What is Innovation?

Innovation is the intersection of creativity and problem solving :: Ion Valaskakis

Episode Summary

Episode 40 of “What is Innovation?” is here! Jared talks with Ion Valaskakis, President at President, Portfolio IV Media and Consulting, on how creativity differentiates innovation from invention and reinvention. He also discusses how to prepare for the future through his proprietary frameworks: FuturePROOF Scorecard and Playbook

Episode Notes

Ion Valaskakis,  President at President, Portfolio IV Media and Consulting shares how creativity drives the difference of innovation, invention, and reinvention. He also discusses how to FuturePROOF using his proprietary framework and scorecard, 

 

More about our guest:

Ion Valis is a strategic advisor to entrepreneurs and executives by helping them anticipate the future, accelerate their performance, and reinvent themselves when necessary. He enables organizations to "see around the corner" through two proprietary frameworks that he has developed - the FuturePROOF Scorecard and Playbook. His book 'The Magnificent Mistake' talks on how to learn from your mistakes, he has also given a TEDx Talk on the changing nature of leadership in the 21st century, and hosted a bi-weekly podcast on how to apply the management consultant’s toolkit to everyday problems. Ion plans to launch an online course called "Reinvention Boot Camp" that will empower thousands of people with the tools, skillset, and mindset to reinvent themselves regularly.

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Episode Guide:

2:09 - What Is Innovation?

3:33 - How does creativity  

6:24 - Creativity: Innovation and Innovative

7:08 - What isn't Innovation

8:04 - Cybernetics: Intersection of domains  

8:44 - Is it Innovation and Improvement?: Airbnb and Uber

11:20 - Distinction of Innovation and Invention

13:44 - Passion projects and Reinvention as a space

16:07 - How do you see reinvention? Looking forward deeper into 21st century

17:02 - Netflix: examplar of reinvention

23:13 - Reinvention values into an organization

28:25 - Holy Trinity: Innovation, Reinvention, and Future-proofing

32:00 - Advice to future innovators: ideas are worse than worthless  

33:39 - "Real Innovators"  

33:51 - 2nd advice: Embrace your craziness

34:33 - Last advice: think about what you can subtract

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Resources Mentioned: 

Frameworks:

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Persons mentioned:

Brands used as examples:

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OUTLAST Consulting offers professional development and strategic advisory services in the areas of innovation and diversity management.

Episode Transcription

/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 Ion Valaskakis. 

 

Jared Simmons  00:29

Ion is a strategic adviser to entrepreneurs and executives. He helps them anticipate the future, accelerate their performance and reinvent themselves when necessary, and enables organizations to see around the corner there are two proprietary frameworks that he has developed the future proof scorecard and playbook. As an executive coach, he works with senior leaders to broaden and enhance their leadership toolkit with a particular focus on sound decision making, personal effectiveness and work life integration. In addition, he is about to launch an online course called reinvention boot camp that will empower 1000s of people with the tools skill set and mindset to reinvent themselves regularly. And as a free range thinker. He has written a business strategy book on how to learn from your mistakes, given a TED talk on the changing nature of leadership in the 21st century, and hosted a biweekly podcast on how to apply the management consultants toolkit to everyday problems. The common through line in his writing and speaking is that they center around the Twin concepts of anticipation and reinvention and speaks regularly to audiences on megatrends. And in that light is working with a global group of consultants to design a new operating system to harness the potential of the hybrid workforce and reinvent work for the post pandemic world. Ian has an MBA from London Business School, a Master of Arts in political science from Western University, and a bachelor's degree from McGill University. He has lived in Montreal, Washington, DC, London, Paris, and now calls Los Angeles home. And welcome to the show. Absolute pleasure to be here, Jared. So why don't we just dive right in? What in your mind is innovation.

 

Ion Valaskakis  02:12

So I have to confess that I prepared a little bit for this in the sense that I didn't think I had a definition that kind of readily leaped to mind before this conversation. But after thinking about this a little bit, I came up with a definition of innovation that's related to creativity. And so for me, innovation is the practical expression of creativity. What I mean by that is that creativity is about having ideas. But innovation is about having ideas to solve specific problems. So for me, innovation is a really focused application of the wonderful human, you know, kind of inclination, we have to be creative. And there's this little aphorism that I came across, that was about creativity that I've taken the liberty of paraphrasing. So creativity is said to be the intelligence having fun. And innovation for me is creativity doing work. So that's my definition of creativity.

 

Jared Simmons  03:05

Yeah, I love that. That is fantastic. The connection between creativity and work is a non obvious one. And after hearing you explain it, it does feel like a very intuitive definition of what innovation, what innovation is in a broader context, I want to unpack creativity a little bit, because that's a word that a lot of our listeners are in the business world. Creativity is not a term you hear a lot in the business world. Tell me a bit about how you came to really think about creativity as it relates to innovation.

 

Ion Valaskakis  03:38

Sure, so I was informed a little bit by a British mathematician called Marcus du Sautoy. He's got this wonderful definition of creativity, which is really kind of wrapping it in three things, exploring, combining and transforming. And for me, when I came across those words, it really encapsulated the nature of creativity. For me, it's not about incremental change, or kind of making things better at the margins. It's really about, you know, exploration, that kind of intellectual vastness of, you know, coming up with ideas out of nothing, or out of the ether. Combining or recombining things, as many innovations these days are about re mixing existing is situations and making them better that way. And then finally, transforming which is you know, in some ways, I think, the fulcrum of any kind of really creative pieces, really when it changes the object or changes your your perspective on the object. So for me, creativity is really a high level activity and innovation being associated with creativity, I think, you know, kind of is, you know, reflected glory in the sense that to be truly innovative, you have to be creative, and to be creative. You have to explore, combine and transform.

 

Jared Simmons  04:47

I love that in the elements of transformation, in my mind is where the value gets unlocked. Because you can explore to your heart's content, you know, and you can you can you can do all these other things, but until you transform it into something else, pull it out of its existing form, take those oil paints and apply them to the canvas, transform them into something else in the tube. It's paint applied to the canvas. It's it's art, and it's creativity and expression.

 

Ion Valaskakis  05:16

Absolutely, you know, I think there's a high bar that we should set for a definition of creativity, I think you've done a very good job just now. And I think most people would agree through looking through those lenses, that maybe a lot of things that we think are creative are actually not because they don't meet those thresholds. But bring it back to innovation. I think what's interesting about the combination of those two words, is that just as we hold our creativity to a high bar, I think we should hold innovation to a high bar, because it's one thing to kind of transform something. But if it's not transformed in a way that actually solves a specific problem, then it maybe can't really be considered innovative. So you know, kind of a creative artists can redefined the way we look at perspective. For example, an art isn't necessarily designed to solve a problem. But an innovation solves a specific problem or meets a certain need. And that's where creativity and kind of problem solving, I think intersect in the beautiful form that is innovation.

 

Jared Simmons  06:13

Innovation, as the intersection of creativity and problem solving feels very intuitive. Now that it's been said, and now that I've heard it, it does it feels very intuitive. And I wonder, are there some problems that lend themselves to innovation more than others? So when I think about the intersection, can I just solve any problem creatively and have that be innovation or innovative?

 

Ion Valaskakis  06:38

I would say no, again, in keeping with this kind of slightly esoteric, but I think grounded kind of expression of creativity and innovation, I think creativity really comes out of a wellspring of a particularly big or thorny, or as the term of art goes, wicked problem. So you know, kind of slightly improving something is not creative, nor innovative. And, you know, I think one of the thrusts of your podcast is to define what innovation is, but also what it isn't. And so what I would say is that innovation isn't improvement, if you're just improving something at the margins, if it's a small problem that requires a small fix, or a slightly different perspective on it, then it's not really an innovation, that's just, you know, kind of good stuff. And so I think to answer your question, the bigger the problem, the thorny or the problem, some cases, revealing a problem that we didn't even know existed can be the most innovative thing of all, once you crack the code on that. So I think there's lots of different ways we can take care. Yeah,

 

Jared Simmons  07:36

yeah, I think that's, that's well said in the element of that last piece, you just kind of threw in really kind of got my brain going in a different direction around. If you think about the creativity and in problem solving intersection, it doesn't have to be unlocked at the end of the problem solving process, it can be unlocked at the beginning, just by creatively looking at the problem and stating it in a way that allows people to explore new areas. Think about cybernetics, and that sort of context where it's not really I wouldn't consider it a domain of study, but more of an intersection of domains, where psychology and study of the brain meet, you know, machine learning and things like that the innovation isn't necessarily in what is produced a prosthetic arm or, or, or what have you, innovation was in connecting these two, you know, 6070 years ago before this technology was even at the point that it's at today. So it doesn't necessarily have to be the endpoint where the where the innovation occurs, it could also be in just the domains that in part,

 

Ion Valaskakis  08:42

yeah, and you raise an excellent point, I was thinking of companies that I find particularly innovative in preparation for our conversation. And two that come to mind, I would say combine innovation and improvement in the same kind of package, but only one of it is innovative. So I'll give you an example. Airbnb, for me is a very innovative company. Now it's not innovative in that it replaced hotels, that's just an improvement. Right. But where innovative was it found a way for us to leverage, you know, unused capacity, you know, basically rooms in our houses that we weren't using. Similarly, with Uber, the piece of Uber that replaces a taxi, which is, you know, kind of selling, get it on your phone. That's an improvement because taxi companies can develop apps, right? But the ability to kind of monetize follow resources, like your car, that was the innovation, and obviously, the peanut butter and chocolate combination of the two is really what makes it compelling. And there are pieces of it that you know, removed friction and created kind of digital versions of trust that were, you know, if not innovative, certainly, really big transformations. But I think it's interesting to see this idea of intersectionality coming together which is you know, the intersection of two problems one can be solved with improvements and the other one with an innovation. You combine the two Together, they can recreate, you know, billion dollar companies and, and really transform the world.

 

Jared Simmons  10:04

Wow. Yeah, I love that distinction within the business model, because it's not drawn very often. So thank you for highlighting that, because I hadn't thought of that. And I think it really underscores one of the points that I'm very passionate about, which is a difference between innovation and invention. And you don't have to invent something to innovate, which your definition of innovation also supports in terms of, you know, focusing on creativity and problem solving. I think with Airbnb and with Uber, a lot of attention gets paid to the technology to the app, the design of the app, etc, etc, the back end of how they brought it to life. But I agree with you, I think the innovation really is in the transformation of value, you know, the car sitting in the driveway, the room sitting empty, transforming that into a different type of value for the user. And it also puts a different user in the center, right? Yeah, most people talk about innovation with those companies, they talk about the customer. But if you're talking about the homeowner, or the driver being the center of the innovation, then it really puts it in different perspective.

 

Ion Valaskakis  11:09

And that's why those two examples are fascinating, because they're, you know, they're examples of two sided markets. And we tend to focus on one side of that market. And you just pointed out there's, there's value in spotting the second, I want to come back for a second to your thought about the distinction between innovation and invention. For me, and I'd love to get your thoughts on it. But for me in invention is kind of creating something out of nothing. Whereas innovation is building on top of something that already existed and transforming in a, you know, materially significant way. Maybe I'm contradicting myself, but you know, the canonical example of invention or inventor is Thomas Edison, right? And Thomas Edison created the light bulb, you could say that he innovated on the gas lamp, right, you know, in terms of lighting, but he really did create an entirely new kind of system and energy source and reliability. So in that sense, it's a true innovation. But it's also an invention in that he created an entirely new category. But I think, for me, at least invention is creating something out of nothing. Innovation is like building on that standing on the shoulders of giants in some cases, but still transforming it in a materially almost unrecognizable way as, as our great friend Thomas Edison did,

 

Jared Simmons  12:20

yes. Oh, no, I love that Thomas Edison is, is a great example. For that point. I hadn't really discussed him in that context. But this filament as an invention, if you overlay the innovation definition you apply there, the overlay over the invention of that filament could be a number of things. It could be the light bulb itself. It could be the network that, you know, he built in, in New York, the power distribution networks he built in New York to actually monetize the idea and democratize it is the fourth. So yeah, so there's different layers of innovation on top of that single invention. And then you if you then sort of think about Nikola Tesla, and the work he did in terms of bringing power to the masses, that innovation, the different types of current that traveled far over longer distances, helped to take that invention of Thomas Edison's and really create value and transform lives in places that Edison wouldn't have been able to with his power distribution system. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great example of invention. And Tesla, you know, briefly worked in Edison shop, it's most geniuses, they needed their own space. But the work that he did after that a lot of it was invention, but some of it was reinvention. On Tesla, as part of some of the things he learned and saw in Edison shop, I would love to get your thoughts and I know, this is something that you're you have a lot of passion for. But I would love to get your thoughts on reinvention as a space.

 

Ion Valaskakis  13:53

Absolutely. So thank you for bringing that up. Because it's a it's a personal area of passion and professional activity for me. So I for the last better part of a decade, I've spent helping individuals and organizations reinvent themselves. And partly, it's about, you know, all the r&d, follow, you know, fill in the word reimagine, redesign, you know, reboot, re launch, remix, all of those elements that go into play, particularly at the organization level, but also at the individual level. And in thinking about the relationship between reinvention and innovation, if we think about innovation, as we described earlier, as kind of creativity applied to a problem being the definition of innovation, I think we have mentioned for me is a form of innovating on yourself. And when I define yourself, I mean either yourself, the individual or yourself, your organization. But for me reinvention can't be done to something external, like I'm not going to reinvent the National Hockey League or the National Football League if I'm not part of the National Football League, but I can reinvent myself. I can read my resume and my organization, my industry because I'm a part of it. So It's a very personal form of innovation. And I would argue, just as I have about reinvention, but but personal innovation of some form, whether it's to yourself as an individual or to your organization, is one of the meta skills of the 21st century that we need to develop. You know, I'm sure you've read tons of books about how automation and AI and algorithms are going to kind of turn people into either unemployed or robots themselves in terms of just doing mechanical work at Amazon jobs. And the reality is that we're gonna have to constantly change the way we do things, both as organizations, but also as individuals, right? And so for me, adopting this innovation mindset, this reinvention mindset is probably the hardest, but the most important thing we can do. And so I know we talked a little bit off Mike, about this idea of innovation and reinvention, it's mindset. But for me, that's the fulcrum of the 21st century type of innovation that we want to achieve, which is almost in terms of posture and approach, rather than product innovations that just making you know, kind of widgets a little bit better or a little bit less costly.

 

Jared Simmons  16:07

Right, right. How do you see reinvention? As we stand here and look forward deeper into 21st century? How do you see the structure so reinvention becoming a thing in the in the corporate world, their innovation experts is training on innovation, tell me more about how this can become more embedded in the corporate world as a concept?

 

Ion Valaskakis  16:31

Absolutely. So the 20th century was defined by or corporations creating value by stripping out inefficiencies. So they basically made widgets, whether they were fancy widgets, like cars, or not so fancy, were just like ball bearings. And the only way to really add value is to kind of strip away in efficiencies, make it cheaper per unit cost. And they did this in various ways up to including outsourcing, and then, you know, shipping manufacturing to lower cost places, right. And that was really how the 20th century economic growth engine was created in the 21st century, that is just not going to pass muster. And organizations in order to stay relevant, let alone to stay remain profitable, will have to constantly reinvent themselves, sometimes in whole cloth. And the company that I think of that is probably the best exemplar of reinvention, today is Netflix. Netflix is probably going on their third, fourth reinvention, if you think about what they've done, they reinvented the concept of distributing DVD rentals, right? They disrupted blockbuster with a simple, I guess you would call an innovation of distributing by mail, if you know your listeners are old enough to remember that. But then they pivoted into streaming. And that was something that was not going to be an automatic win. But they were ahead of the curve in terms of figuring out that that was what they needed to do. then subsequent to that they were the first of these organizations to actually buy and create original content. So instead of just licensing, you know that Seinfeld's and the television shows of this world, they created their own content with like House of Cards and other things like that, again, moving up the value chain, and vertically integrating upwards. And then more recently, as recently as last week, this is how current this is. I haven't watched the squid game, maybe you have, but it is an absolute phenomenon. And it's an it's an indication of their latest reinvention, which is reinventing the sourcing of content. So what they're calling Glocal content, global and localized content. So squid game is content that was created in South Korea, but they have, you know, kind of tapped into themes that are universally interesting. And so that's why it's the number one show in the history of Netflix passing bridgerton Most recently, and so this is probably the third or as I say, fourth, we mentioned, and they're not done yet. I mean, for Netflix to stay a multi billion dollar company, they will need to constantly reinvent themselves. And I would argue that their real competitive advantage is not 10 surrenders. The content acquisition guy or read reads Hastings, and CEO, it's their ability to reinvent themselves over and over and over again. That's what makes them unique. So I will never bet against Netflix, I should probably buy Netflix stock since I, you know, try to walk the talk. But I think that their superpower is reinvention. I think they're an example of what every organization will need to be which is nimble, agile, flexible, supple, and prepare to change almost on a dime before they need to, by the way, not right as a consequence of some disruptive force coming into play. All of the reinventions they did occurred before they had to happen, which is another thing important constituents of reinvention.

 

Jared Simmons  19:47

Wow, yeah, that is a that's an amazing example for a number of reasons. You think of reinvention at an organizational level? I think most people think of small companies, and a lot of the terms you use to describe that flex, flexible, you know agile, all those things you don't usually apply to Fortune 50 companies. And that is testament in and of itself just in the sort of language that you have to use to accurately describe this company. And I couldn't agree more about the concept of reinvention, playing out in their history as you look over it, but probably wouldn't have noticed. Had you not connected those dots for me so so thank you for that. I recall being in a training a long time ago, I am old enough to remember the mailing of CDs, and

 

Ion Valaskakis  20:35

I even remember Blockbuster Video. Oh, Horace. So we're both have a certain vintage?

 

Jared Simmons  20:40

Yes, yes, the experience I feel bad for so you know, because the excitement of going into a Blockbuster video to see what was available if there was an experience there that some people will never, never have. And it's a it's a shame.

 

Ion Valaskakis  20:56

And you remember, like the excitement you had when you saw the candidate the case, but also the fact that there was the velcro sticky that indicated that it was in stock? Yes. Hey, great. He's out. And they have one more copy. Clear, which is something that like digital natives who just press play on their Netflix queue never have to worry about them, they have to worry about bandwidth, but that indescribable pleasure of, you know, kind of being the double winner of the movies, they're the movies out, and it's available.

 

Jared Simmons  21:26

Exactly, exactly. That form of scarcity and reward that dopamine hit is just not there for in this era. Exactly. I remember being in a conversation in an innovation training, actually, in that in that timeframe, and talking to someone who had been to a conference. And he said, there's this company called Netflix, you know, watch out for them, you know, they're going to do big things. Because they were just starting to mail, they were just starting this mail thing. And people were kind of like, oh, you're gonna mail me things I'm have to wait for you know, it was not intuitive. But he was already talking about streaming. And this is 56k 120 K, you know, this is before the infrastructure existed to be able to stream movies. But he was already talking about a future where, you know, he saw the current technology and his current innovation as a stopgap basically, for what the future held. And I think that is that is that becomes cultural that mindset of, okay, yeah, we're doing this now. This is the way the world looks now. But we have an understanding of where things are headed. And you know, that Gretzky quote, about skating to where the puck is going, I think that's probably the core to making reinvention part of your culture, which I think that's what I wanted to to get your thoughts on is, I can see, you know, one person like me buying into reinvention at the individual level, but are there things that you know, that you can do as an organization to make reinvention, cultural?

 

Ion Valaskakis  23:00

Absolutely. And I love the fact that you quoted Wayne Gretzky is a good Canadian, I would have worked him into the conversation for sure. Because I unless otherwise, they take away my Canadian passport of Cooper. But no, absolutely, but but you can totally bake in kind of reinvention values into an organization. It's about a mindset for sure. And it comes from the top down in the sense that the CEO or management team has to kind of live and breathe this and model this. But I also it's also about, you know, the kind of talent that you attract, and you and you empower, because the best ideas don't come from the top down, you get direction from the top down, but the best ideas come from the bottom up often are from everywhere. Yes. And so you need to create an organization which is designed to kind of tap the collective intelligence of your, of your people, and, you know, kind of draw on these innovations wherever they come from, you know, some some of the greatest innovations come from the shop floor. And, you know, we've all heard the stories about Toyota and Kaizen, where, you know, someone pulls the and on cord, and stops the assembly line. But the second part of that is that that same person or one of the people who were his peers, his or her peers, figures out, Hey, this is the problem. And here's a really innovative kind of smart way to fix this problem. And they've been empowered to do so. So I think part of it is talent, attraction, retention, empowerment, but it's also about having this posture of looking constantly onto the horizon for both threats and opportunities. So I call this kind of radar and sonar scanning, where you're looking for I use the metaphor of radar for threats, you know, kind of bogeys to us and fighter pilot term, and sonar for looking at opportunities. So basically looking at either market gaps or being exposed for threats that are coming threats being you know, kind of disruptive insurgents that are coming so Netflix to Blockbuster, Airbnb to Hilton, right or to a taxi, but opportunities can also manifest themselves and so reinvention is about scanning the horizon proactively, and moving in the direction of change before it's necessary. And I think that's the last piece of the puzzle is having this inclination and embrace of change where you're willing to both to run towards change both because you know, the faster you get there, the trip will be shorter and less bumpy. But also to use Peter Drucker's famous phrase, the best way to predict the future is to create. And so the sooner you can get to the future, the sooner you can kind of put your fingerprints all over it. And so I think a huge component of reinvention is that, and then the last piece, which is both cultural but also, I think structural, is to create organizations that are intentionally supple, you know, General Stanley McChrystal, and others have written about Team of Teams and other concepts. And I love the idea of this kind of molecular approach to organizations where you have a modular construction, where you can kind of divert resources to exciting opportunities or to defend against, you know, threatening insurgents. And that doesn't happen accidentally, right? You have 100,000 person, you know, organization, and it's, you know, five layers of bureaucracy between you and the CEO. That's, that's just not gonna work. Sure. Amazon hired 500,000 People in the last year, but they still live by something called the to Pizza rule. And have you ever heard of Jeff Bezos, that but he said, basically, no project team should ever be so big, that they can't be fed by two extra large pizzas. So that really sets a limit to like how big these kind of molecules within the organization can get. It's not accidental that Amazon is one of the most innovative companies for sure, because they're constantly scanning the horizon going to where the puck is going, as Gretzky famously said, but also creating a simple structure, even amongst, you know, one of the largest corporations on earth, to facilitate this posture of reinvention that I think Netflix, Amazon, and some of the best companies achieve and run towards everyday.

 

Jared Simmons  26:56

I think the Amazon example is instructional in a lot of ways in sort of the identification of the molecular approach. And you know, the small teams and that being something that that leads to a supple organization allows you to be more flexible, responsive, and innovative and reinvented. Again, that's part of this that gets less attention, right, most of the attention goes to the ecosystem that's been created in the sort of tech back end, and what that enables and the relationship with suppliers and all those things. But the thing that kind of gets overlooked is that there are people managing all those things, people coordinating all those things, people moving these these elements in and out, prioritizing D prioritizing them allocating spend against these things. And that's what makes innovation and I think extension reinvention actually happen. You can have great ideas, you can have innovative ideas, concepts, technologies that could lead to innovation. But unless you have at the scale of an Amazon or Netflix, unless you have an organizational structure that not only allows it, but enables it puts it on steroids, you don't become one of the biggest companies on Earth with just a great idea and smart people. I think the unlock of organizational structure that you're highlighting is something that doesn't get enough attention in the space of innovation and reinvention,

 

Ion Valaskakis  28:24

I would agree. And I would connect the kind of the Holy Trinity for me innovation, reinvention and future proofing in the following way. So I think as I told you, I help organizations reinvent themselves. But up in parallel to that. And I think in part and parcel, I help them future proof themselves. And so I've developed this kind of framework to help organizations structure their approach towards the future. And so when I call it future proofing, it's because the acronym that spells out the word proof has five different levels to it. So P for me is about predicting the near future of your competitive space. So I think it's a fool's errand to try to predict 510 15 years in the future, it's too far in advance, but you can predict what's going to happen in the next 12 To 18 to 24 months. And another great Canadian, William Gibson once famously said, The future is already here. It's just not widely distributed yet. So you need to scan the horizon to look at what the near future is, and act accordingly. But I will say predict a little don't predict a lot because once you get over your skis, then you get off piece as it were. The AR improve is, as I said earlier, using radar and sonar to scan for and identify threats and opportunities. The Oh, the first step is organizing your thinking with all sorts of cool frameworks and tools like scenario planning, red teams, and other things that are really thought exercises. But there are ways to structure intelligently the way you're going to look towards the future. And then the other Oh, which is I think, really important, and to your point earlier about Amazon, go on offense with experiments and lots of little bets. The most valuable company in the world that doesn't exist you as Amazon Web Services, it doesn't exist because it's part of Amazon. But if you spun it out, it would probably be as valuable as Amazon or near peer, as valuable as Amazon. And how did that happen? Well, that basically was at first a recognition that they had to do this for themselves. And they said, Well, why don't we provide this as a service, not just do it for ourselves, we'll do it for someone else. And that was an experiment. Now, of course, to your point, Amazon has the scale and strength to turn an experiment into one of the world's largest companies, at least internally, right. That's what I mean by going on offense. And then the last piece in F. So PR, o f, the last piece is what I call strategic fluidity. So what we were talking about earlier, creating an organizational structure that allows you to flow resources. So Bruce Lee, one of my heroes says, You be like water, I love that. And I think organizations should be like water, they should be able to flow resources around rocks the way they do in rivers, but also flowing resources to things like AWS, when it takes off or flowing it away from the fire stick when it doesn't work out, and so on, and so forth. If you have this approach of predicting a little bit using radar and sonar, organizing your thoughts going on offense, and then finally having this fluid or at not agile in the kind of technical sense, but a subtle sense, right, then you have an organizational structure that is both future proof, because of the word kind of association, but also is primed for reinvention. And I would argue innovation,

 

Jared Simmons  31:24

yes, I love that framework and the acronym to support it, because it encompasses a lot of different elements, but it almost makes the connection among them self evident. And I think that's the trick with thinking about these conceptual frameworks and models. It's not the work, you know, we come up with these, these frameworks to help people think about the work. And I think that the more elegant and more they point to the actual work, the more useful they are. And that's what I really like about your structure. There is it's elegant, five elements of it. And it points to where the actual work is.

 

Ion Valaskakis  32:00

I love that emphasis you're placing, I know that one of the topics that you'd like to address is sometimes advice to future innovators or innovators listening to us out there. And I think I'd want to kind of underscore that point, one of the mantras that I have, which is a bit tongue in cheek, but and provocative, but intentionally so which is that ideas are worse than worthless, in the sense that having an idea in and of itself is not nearly good enough. In fact, we often get seduced by the concept of the idea how many people have you come across and said, You know what, I had an idea to sell books online. And I should have done it. And now I'd be the world's richest man, right? Well, you know what you did? I'm sure there were 1000s of people who had the idea to do it, but only one person had the gumption to actually do it. So ideas are worse than worthless in the sense that they can seduce you into thinking, Oh, well, most of the battle is won by just having the idea. That's why people say, Well, I had this great idea. But I'm not going to tell you, right, like, you know what I tell people those ideas, because if they're going to create Amazon, based on your idea, they deserve the credit, because the value created is in the execution of the idea, not the idea itself. And so my advice to future entrepreneurs and innovators is don't be seduced by the idea, you know, be excited by the idea. Inspiration is a perishable resources novella, rather complex essay, but execution, turning that idea into something real into solving a real problem into ironing out its issues and problems and kind of operational challenges. That's where value is really created. And that's where innovation kind of takes form and takes like food. And so for me, real innovators are the ones who kind of get stuck into the problem of making it real as opposed to just dreaming up what could be. Now of course, dreaming it up is part of the process. I would say the second piece of advice is embrace your craziness. And any innovation worth its weight in gold was crazy until it wasn't right. You know, Edison was a kook until he created the filament and created the light bulb and created, you know, the Edison company and so on, so forth. But for a long time, he was that crazy guy on the end of the street who was, you know, kind of trying to replace gas, right. And it didn't work out. You know, Elon Musk is a genius now, but 25 years ago, he's just a quirky dude with like a crazy dream. And, you know, half the things that he's creating now, still creating a boring company and living on Mars. But you know what, he'll be proven right? At some point, I think because innovations are crazy until they aren't. So embrace your craziness as an innovator and you will be rewarded. Then the last kind of piece of advice I would say is, and this comes back full circle to some of the things we were saying, which is don't always think about adding things to life, think about what you can subtract. So innovation can be very, very valuable. If you remove something from the equation. If you think about what Airbnb and Uber did, they added certain things like they added the ability to leverage unused capacity, but they removed a lot of friction points. You know, the idea that you can without having to build a hotel can rent out a room, you've removed the friction point of, you know, kind of making it happen. You also remove the friction point of having to run background checks on people because the trust ecosystem of these two services has made it kind of completely natural that you would step into a stranger's car or sleeping in a stranger's home. Allow some stranger to live in your home. Yeah, again, that's because they've subtracted things as much as they have anything else. So I think innovation is often you know, the province of adding things. But sometimes the most counterintuitive, but valuable innovations come from subtracting things from the equation.

 

Jared Simmons  35:36

What they had a lot of great stuff to think about, I feel like you were speaking to me directly on a couple of those points of advice. So I will thank you personally for that. The innovation by subtraction I will definitely spend some time thinking about it's not intuitive. And it's also something that requires more than discipline, it requires a level of self confidence that I think is not obvious. You have to really trust yourself to think about what you can take out of something. And so thank you for for sharing that. And thank you, Ian for your time and spending spending time with us today. The time just flew by. And I really enjoyed the conversation and learned a lot. And I thank you for spending some quality, some of your quality time with us today.

 

Ion Valaskakis  36:22

Pleasure, Jared and I look forward to having another conversation with you at some point because I think we just touched the tip of the iceberg on this one

 

Jared Simmons  36:29

thinking the same thing we've got another conversation into and as the for sure sounds great. Thank you so much.

 

Ion Valaskakis  36:35

Absolutely. Take care. All right, take care.

 

Jared Simmons  36:42

We'd love to hear your thoughts about this week's show. You can drop us a line on Twitter at Outlast, LLC, o u t l e s t LLC, or follow us on LinkedIn where we're at less consulting. Until next time, keep innovating. Whatever that means,