Episode 42 of “What is Innovation?” is out! Jared talks with Dr. John Ennis, co-founder of Aigora, a world-renowned authority on the application of artificial intelligence to sensory and consumer science. John shares how fast caterpillars and a beautiful butterflies are manifestations of innovation.
Dr. John Ennis, co-founder of Aigora, a world-renowned authority on the application of artificial intelligence to sensory and consumer science. John shares how fast caterpillars and a beautiful butterflies are manifestations of innovation.
More about our guest:
Dr. John Ennis, co-founder of Aigora, is a world-renowned authority on the use of artificial intelligence within sensory and consumer science. John is a Ph.D. mathematician who conducted his postdoctoral studies in computational neuroscience and who has more than a dozen years of experience as a sensory and consumer science consultant. Author of 40+ peer-reviewed articles and 2 books, John is chair of both the ASTM E18 "Sensory Evaluation" division and the Sensometric Society; invited speaker and workshop organizer at international conferences; host of the popular industry podcast "AigoraCast;" a member of the editorial boards of both Food Quality and Preference and Journal of Sensory Studies; and past winner of the Food Quality and Preference "Researcher of the Future" award
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Episode Guide:
1:34 - What Is Innovation
2:52 - What is Process?
4:34 - Is the new way actually better?
5:48 - Fast caterpillar vs Beautiful butterflies
7:36 - Leveraging survey (The second act of a three-part play)
8:57 - Big companies innovating
9:56 - Lessons of a second act and safety nets
10:31 - Lessons from Waymo: Google's self driving car
12:19 - Creating an emotional investment to push bigger barriers in big companies
14:22 - Industrial revolutions: centralized and decentralized
17:10 - Working in parallels
20:50 - What isn't innovation?
22:07 - Surveys and scales
23:58 - Examples from all over the world
25:04 - Advice for innovators
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Resources Mentioned:
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Previous episode mentioned:
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OUTLAST Consulting offers professional development and strategic advisory services in the areas of innovation and diversity management.
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 Dr. John Ennis.
Jared Simmons 00:30
Dr. John Ennis, president and co-founder of Aigora, is a world-renowned authority on the application of artificial intelligence to sensory and consumer science. John is a Ph.D. mathematician who conducted his postdoctoral studies in computational neuroscience and who has more than a dozen years of experience as a sensory and consumer science consultant. Author of 40+ peer-reviewed articles and 2 books, John is chair of both the ASTM E18 "Sensory Evaluation" division and the Sensometric Society; invited speaker and workshop organizer at international conferences; host of the popular industry podcast "AigoraCast;" a member of the editorial boards of both Food Quality and Preference and Journal of Sensory Studies; and past winner of the Food Quality and Preference "Researcher of the Future" award. John, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us today.
Dr. John Ennis 01:23
Oh, yeah, pleasure to be here, Jared. Thanks a lot.
Jared Simmons 01:24
I had a great time on your podcast. I really appreciate you making time, (and) to spend time with us. Of course, why don't we dive right in? What in your mind is innovation?
Dr. John Ennis 01:37
Well, I think that the key thing is the innovation and invention are two different things. Invention, you have some new idea, usually, actually a combination and within invention, there's some aspects, some new things that's been brought into the world. Usually, it's a combination of some new thing with existing technologies, right? Then, innovation is the process of bringing that idea into the world, getting people to adopt it, figuring out the use case, figuring out the specific ways that this invention is going to be used and hopefully making money. I mean, there's a debate about whether or not you have to actually make money to innovate. But in some sense, if you can't make money on the idea, then you have to wonder is it really valuable? Because to some extent, is representation of the value. I think that would be the key thing, maybe the difference between invention and innovation, and realizing that it's a really whole separate set of activities to innovate. We can get into that a little bit but that would be my short answer.
Jared Simmons 02:35
You went right to a great word, which is process. A lot of people, people in their minds have this idea that innovation is this lightning strike moment that happens. At three o'clock in the morning, you sit bolt up right in your bed, and you've got the answer. But you definitely went right to the word process. Tell me more about that.
Dr. John Ennis 02:56
I think a specific example, something we've been working on in our company, for years, really, which is, we have a platform for smart speaker surveys. We're doing surveys, voice activated surveys, on smart speakers. Now, you might think that's just an obvious thing to do. Obviously, since you can use a smart speaker, to communicate with people in their homes, it would just be a clearly good thing to do, to do a survey over smart speakers. We've been working on that idea, since at least 2019. It's the thing where it goes and fits and starts because for one thing, if you're trying to do something new, there's always a certain amount of inertia, you have to overcome just give you a change in behavior. There has to be some benefit even when you find people. I should give a lot of credit here to Johnny Kumar, and Natalie's tour at General Mills, they were one of the, and I have permission to talk about this because they presented the results at SSP, the society sensor professionals, webinar series, they presented the results. This is all public acknowledgement.
Dr. John Ennis 04:02
Anyway, they were, one of the early adopters of the technology, help question on how does the new thing relate to the existing way of doing things. Usually you have a problem that's out there in the world, that's probably being solved in some way. Back in the day with the steam engine, there was water in mines, it had to be pumped out and there were really inefficient ways of pumping water out of wells, even at the far extreme, you might have an Archimedes screw that's getting the water out of the wall, so you're solving the problem, somehow, you have some better way of solving the problem. In our case, we want to get information from consumers. What's their opinion? Whether it's objective opinion, it's stuff stuck to their teeth or that's a yes or no question, or do they like it, a little more subjective, but you want to get that information out of people. Well, you can do it on a phone with say, people looking at a survey and touching buttons or you can do it while people are talking. The idea of doing a survey with voice would be that someone could pay attention more to the product experience, they give you more reliable information, you see more clear signals with a lot of ideas about why it would be better. Then there's the question, is it actually better?
Jared Simmons 05:11
So testing that hypothesis, essentially?
Dr. John Ennis 05:13
Yeah, exactly, you got that. First of all, you can get the same answers more or less, that's one question. First thing you can do there is take the existing way and compare it head to head with a new way.
Jared Simmons 05:24
Like A-B testing?
Dr. John Ennis 05:25
Well, yeah, not even really,
Jared Simmons 05:27
or independent population?
Dr. John Ennis 05:28
Yeah, well, in this case, actually, maybe the same people. Half of the people will do the new way first, then the old way, half of the people do the old way and then the new way, so just want to compare and try to figure out, Okay, what's going on here with the new technology? How does it compare to the old technology? But even then, when you go to use the new technology, there's the question, how do you implement it. This actually gets to another good idea, I think, important concept around innovation, which is the idea of fast caterpillar versus beautiful butterflies. Because very often with new technology, there's a temptation to simply swap it in one for one for the old way of solving the problem.
Dr. John Ennis 06:02
What you might do, for example, that's called fast caterpillar, where you just do what you were doing before, maybe a little more efficiently. Beautiful butterflies, where you change the way you work altogether. It's a total transformation. We can talk about some examples of that. In case of the surveys, what you might do is you have your survey the way that you give it on the phone and you just transcribe it, and you now do it that way on a smart speaker, that's fast caterpillar. Let's just see if we get an advantage, we're just gonna swap it in and see what happens. What you find when you do that is, yes, there are some benefits, you get pretty much the same answer, you might see a little bit more differentiation, but you're not really realizing the benefit of the technology. That's where you start to get into beautiful butterfly, are there new things that you can do that you couldn't do before. I think this is another part of exploring space of innovation, you got some new thing, or you got to figure out what you can do with it. This is kind of the product market fit question. Trying to find the use case, okay, you can solve a problem.
Dr. John Ennis 06:59
So for example, with smart speaker surveys, you can brush your teeth and answer questions while you're brushing your teeth, or you can be in the shower. Now you start to get new things or you can have instructions where you want to know, when someone is preparing food, you'd like to walk them through the measurements, you'd like them to prepare the food properly, and guide them through the preparation of the food and along the way, collect information, and so becomes this new way of working. But you need partners in this process, who are willing to try things, who are willing to invest resources, and are willing to go on this journey with you because there's going to be twists and turns and unknowns and things not everything's going to work out. At the end of the day, you will, I would say at this point, now we've gotten to be very proficient with the surveys and we really have figured out how to leverage them in new ways. A lot of doors are opening but this has been two years. This is an idea where you think you think it's just obvious, well, obviously, this is better, let's switch. But it doesn't work like that in real life. In real life, you have to actually, you have to be in the trenches, and you have to try new things. You have to experiment and not everything is going to work out. You have to figure out different ways of looking at problems and sometimes it's quite depressing, honestly, because it's like everything is lost but no, it works out. There you have to always see yourself as being an act like if things aren't going well. I personally find it very helpful. Think of yourself as being in the second act of a three act play, plays right at the start off to get to the characters and there's something bad that happens. Then there's some resolution. If you're in a situation where it seems like something bad is happening, you have to hang in there and see yourselves on this journey. It's like no, this is just the story and there's going to be a resolution. We just have to find it and keep going.
Jared Simmons 08:39
I love that second act of a three act play announcements, that's great. Here it is, you've started your own company, the hero's journey.
Dr. John Ennis 08:46
You have to see yourself as being on a hero's journey otherwise depressing.
Jared Simmons 08:52
Yeah, hope is critical in the entrepreneurs' toolkit, that is a critical tool for sure.
Dr. John Ennis 08:57
Honestly, I would say this is one of the reasons why I think it's difficult for big companies to innovate because I think that in a big company, there's always this idea, okay, we're gonna have some of the big companies will have incubators, and they'll have... You've got, 'okay, we're gonna get some people, some smart people, we're gonna put them in the incubator, and we're gonna let them go forward, we're going to have their own little startup.' Well, the thing that makes me a little bit, I'm sorry to say this, obviously suspicious, I don't know the right word, it's a little bit doubtful that that's going to work is that to some extent, to innovate, to be an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to burn the boats. There has to be no way to go back. When you have the protection that at the end of the day, you're still gonna have a job or something like that... I don't know, this is good advice but for a big company, maybe the deal is alright guys, here's your startup. If it works, you all get really rich, but if it doesn't, you're fired. Then you might get something like where they're waking up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, worried.
Jared Simmons 09:51
Yeah, because there's no third act without the second act, they know exactly what you're saying. It's really hard to learn the lessons of the second act with a safety net and with a paycheck, that's going to hit your account on Friday, regardless of whether this idea works or doesn't. It's just one less step. You'd likely to stop one step sooner or two steps sooner. If you really feel like the bridges that burning and I think you're right, it there's a difference between exceptional incentives. As in like, you guys knock this out of the park, and you'll get this huge bonus and the specter of exceptional suffering.
Dr. John Ennis 10:31
It's funny, progress depends on the second one more. Like about the story of Waymo, right? Where Google had their self-driving car division. The deal was the people were working on that, if they hit certain performance goals, we're going to get bonuses that were anchored to like the value of the division. Well, it turns out that when those bonuses hit, that the division was worth so much, that everybody got enough money, they can all just retire.
Jared Simmons 11:00
All these brilliant people with all this institutional knowledge and success in building a great division are gone. That's funny.
Dr. John Ennis 11:11
I'm gonna be careful but I think reward your children too much for the behavior that you expect to see every day, then they need. My son, if I say I, if you get up and get your clothes on, we do like allowance or whatever, a dollar for him. Well, maybe one day, I'm in a hurry. I'm okay, we'll give you $2. Now, that's what he expects.
Jared Simmons 11:32
It's a new floor.
Dr. John Ennis 11:35
I think the incentives have to be carefully thought about if you are trying to get thinking about this is where I think that sometimes being outside the system, you do see more innovations. We outside because people have no choice, they have to keep going and they don't have (a choice). You only hear about the success stories, too. That's something.
Jared Simmons 11:52
That's exactly right. Yeah, it is a very skewed story and not to overuse your analogy, but it's akin to skipping the second act in a play. You meet these people and they live happily ever after. But why do I care that they lived happily ever after? How do I get attached to this, at a human level? I think that's the piece that's missing from the corporate approach to internal teams on the payroll. How do you create the care and the emotional investment that necessary to push through some of the bigger barriers? I wonder, you read more now about big companies investing a percentage in a startup in their space or whatever. Maybe a meat company might take a small stake in a meatless product, investing in your potential future disruptors. I wonder if that's their tacit acknowledgement, those specific companies' tacit acknowledgement that you can't, in that model, create the amount of inertia, you need to break through that in house internal wall?
Dr. John Ennis 12:57
That's right. That is interesting. Because emotion drives action and fear is one of these emotions that drives action.
Jared Simmons 13:04
That's right and these people (are) already passionate. They've already bought into this; you don't have to sell it to them. They're already bought into the mission and the concept and the idea. I wonder if that's the next evolution of that model. It also allows you to diversify risk, it has a lot of benefits to it. I think that the challenge is who's selecting the investments. So if you've got somebody who was raised in the corporate world for 20-25 years and has been evaluating projects, for a stalwart fortune 100 company, if they go and then apply that filter, and those expectations, to a startup, you're not going to get the benefit of the passion and the uniqueness, you're going to weed those out, you're gonna filter out the wrong ones, you're gonna keep the ones that look most like the existing company.
Dr. John Ennis 13:54
Yeah, especially, I mean, classic example, would be Kodak. Where they couldn't even really understand the business model for digital cameras, because the how, it just didn't make sense, they were steeped in a culture that was based on these, the recurring revenue from the film. There was just... it didn't fit into their worldview. If you have a really new idea and you have a worldview, and a lot of times people aren't even aware their worldviews, you just have your worldview. You're not consciously aware of it so that's as a challenge.
Jared Simmons 14:24
I'm gonna ask you a quick question about the fast caterpillar versus the beautiful butterfly. There's two ways I think you can look at it one is either-or, and one is sequentially. Caterpillars, it's slow, I'll speed it up now then later, I'll let it become a butterfly. Are there lessons companies can learn from their fast caterpillar solutions, they can apply to that beautiful butterflies? Does that make sense?
Dr. John Ennis 14:48
Yes, it does. There's three things. The first is that they are different. That classic example is in the second industrial revolution, like the first one Industrial Revolution was about centralized power. You have the same engine and then you have large vehicles, like a locomotive, where you have large engines so you have centralized power. Then the second industrial revolution was about decentralized power, because you had electricity, which allowed you have motors everywhere. Then you have internal combustion engine, those were the two main drivers of the second industrial revolution. There was this difference. Actually, something very interesting is happening right now with the third industrial revolution versus the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where the third industrial revolution was really about centralized computing. The fourth industrial revolution is about decentralized computing, in some sense. You have web three is coming. That's decentralized networks, Blockchain, for example, decentralized ledger's, that you're going to start to; you've got the Internet of Things pushing sensors down, in the parameter, you have edge computing. Now, of course, you've got internet, or artificial intelligence coming as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as well, that can also be centralized so it's not as quite as clean. But going back to the first and second industrial revolution, with decentralized power, the decision that factories had to make was, do we take our steam engine and replace it with a giant electric motor? Or do we put small electric motors all around the factory?
Dr. John Ennis 16:19
There were a lot of debates at the time. In fact, they're even like Harvard Business Review articles, if I remember correctly, on this topic, about which is better because you could have a big motor in the middle, and you have drive trains running out everywhere. It turns out that it's way better to put small motors everywhere, not even like better, it's way, way better. It was a discussion at the time, especially because we were used to think about the world in a certain way. The companies that were very successful in the first industrial revolution, just replace the steam engine with a big electric motor, and then they couldn't compete on efficiency, there's just so much, you're much more flexible with the small motors. That was an example where fast caterpillar wasn't good enough, that just simply putting in the electric motor and getting some of the benefit didn't realize all the benefits of the decentralized power. It is important to recognize that they are different things.
Dr. John Ennis 17:11
The next thing I would say is that they can be worked on in parallel, that you can have a big goal, like in our world, like in sensory consumer science. A big issue that a lot of companies have is that their historical data are kind of a giant mess, that you've got tons and tons of Excel spreadsheets on lots of people's computers and it's a lot of work to bring all the data together. Now you have to do that if you're going to embrace AI, and you're going to leverage all this historical data where you have to write all your data together. That is the rite of passage for the beautiful butterfly is to get all the data together. But while that's happening, there's a lot of processes that people are engaged in day to day that can be automated and you can get a lot of efficiency gains. The second point I would say is that these two things can be worked on in parallel, you don't it's not like you do fast caterpillar and then you graduate to a beautiful butterfly. You should be aware, you should say, Okay, we're gonna work on both. You're gonna say, Okay, let's take a look, take soccer processes, what can we automate? Let's do that at the same time and especially actually, as we can start snowball, because you start to save time.
Jared Simmons 18:13
Benefits start to stack up and you get distracted.
Dr. John Ennis 18:16
Yeah, so you can get more efficient. Then as you're gaining more efficiency, use that extra capacity to work on the beautiful butterfly. But then the thing that is quite interesting is that sometimes the caterpillar becomes so fast that it starts to seem like a beautiful butterfly, because it does change the way you're working. That if your processes are so automated, for example, that things that used to like require a lot of work from somebody to do it that you would avoid asking. In my world, there might be question like, you're working in a category and you'd like to know, what are all of the; I don't want to get like too technical, what are all the attributes that we've ever asked about in the ice cream category broken up by flavor? That's a question. Now, if you have good processes for getting the answers to that question, then you can get the answer very quickly. But if it's really slow to do that, you will be reluctant to ask those questions, because you know it's going to be a lot of work. To some extent, the faster the caterpillar gets, the more your capability grows, and it does change eventually the way you're working.
Jared Simmons 19:13
Do you then become less interested in the beautiful butterfly, but by effect?
Dr. John Ennis 19:17
No, I would say that's where you do get this thing where the beautiful butterfly can start to emerge, because the key difference is, has the way of working changed? That's the key question, because it can just be the old way of working, but faster, more efficient, or can be some new way of working. Sometimes speed does actually create a new way of working. With the fact that the costs have gone down so much that right this is Say's Law, from economics, that sometimes supply creates demand where it's like so easy to do something you might as well do it and you end up doing it more than you would have otherwise because just doesn't cost you anything to do it. A good example is now with emails right? Once upon a time people used to like pick, you'd have folders and emails, now you can search them so you just archive them all since you know you can search, that's like a beautiful butterfly thing. Sometimes it's so fast to do something that just changes the way you're working. But you should always ask yourself, and it's the same way with the smart speakers, or any innovation. Are we doing the old thing more efficiently? Or do we actually have a new way of solving problems that we are now doing something new with? I'd say at that point; you've really innovated because now you've got a new way of doing things?
Jared Simmons 20:25
Got it. Thank you. That's a great concept. It'll serve me well, for sure. I'm thinking about problems with clients and I'm sure it'll serve other people well, as well.
Dr. John Ennis 20:34
I didn't come up with that. I don't remember where I learned about fast caterpillar, beautiful butterfly, I'll look it up and try to send you, just to give credit where credit's due, but it's incredibly cool.
Jared Simmons 20:43
These tried and true ones are usually in my experience, the ones that ring the most true so that's great. We talked about what innovation is, what isn't in your mind innovation?
Dr. John Ennis 20:55
Well, one thing I would say is, when you don't change the way you're working, right, nothing when you don't change the way that you're operating. It's just bells and whistles, but it's not really actually different. Let me try to take an example where it seems like there's progress. Well, here's an example right now, I think that central banks, we're talking a lot about Central Bank, digital currency. It's not obvious to me that that's really an innovation. Maybe there's some advantages with double spend, and you're going to send money more quickly. But the full vision of something like Bitcoin, is that you are going to have a permission-less economy where people can just transact freely. There's this other world that some people are trying to get to, outside of the system. Whereas the central bank digital currency is like leveraging technology, but not really changing the way that the world works. It wouldn't be transformative in the way that like, going to a world where, I mean, some of the stuffs gets to be political so I don't really go into it too much. But where if you if you say, Alright, look, we're gonna allow people to just transact with each other and it's not under the control of the banks. That's different. It's like the old thing with a new face on it. Then that's not really an innovation.
Dr. John Ennis 22:08
Another example would be the smart speaker surveys, but you just have the survey. For example, if I was gonna ask you how much you like a product but I do it on the phone; very natural to say it's a seven-point scale. 1-7, how much do you like it? Now, when we do it on the smart speaker, we could ask you on a seven point scale, with one being not at all and seven being a lot. How much do you like it and you answer that question. I would argue that's not really an innovation. It's just another way of doing the same thing. Whereas you get some benefits at hand for you or whatever but an innovation is more like I asked you on the smart speak of, okay, please eat the chocolate bar. You eat it. Do you like it? You say yes. Do you like a lot? Yes. Now you say I've gotten really, you gave that? That's a four point scale because you can think like it or don't like it, like it a lot, don't like it. It could be either you don't like it and you really don't like it or you don't like it, but you only don't like it a little. It's a four-point scale. The point is that is now actually a new interaction for somebody.
Jared Simmons 23:08
It's new perspective, new information.
Dr. John Ennis 23:10
It's conversational. If I was gonna ask you, like, how are you doing today, Jared? I wouldn't say I'm a seven-point scale with one being not very good and seven being very good. It doesn't matter. When you go to the voice and you change the way you do your surveys and you make them conversational, now you're innovating, because now you're really giving a new experience. It's a new way of doing your surveys. It's agrees with technology. That's one way to put this, sometimes there's a new technology, but it just gets applied with the old way of looking at things and that's not innovation, it's not enough to simply have an invention, there has to be some new approach to life that comes out of it.
Jared Simmons 23:11
By extension, I would imagine there's a new form of value created. That's interesting.
Dr. John Ennis 23:27
Well, there certainly is a lot more value that gets created. Another example that you see sometimes, that you see this all over all over the world, like in Italy, when I was in Italy, in early 2000s, you go to some parts of Italy that are more 'poorer'. Basically, where there used to be donkey, there's now a motorcycle and they just walked in. Not really an innovation, not really leveraging everything about technology, you're just doing what you used to do, but with the motorcycle instead of donkey. Whereas if you really like embrace the technology, then it's just gonna be a totally different way of operating, like motorcycles have their place in a modern society, they're not just faster donkeys. That's definitely something to look for. To your point, there should be like a step change in the amount of value that's been created. It should just be 30% more, it should be the 10x. Where some right things happen.
Jared Simmons 24:47
Exactly. John, you've got amazing background and experience in this space and seeing innovation from a number of different angles with clients and internal to building your own company and all sorts of things. It's a broad question but do you have any advice for innovators?
Dr. John Ennis 25:07
Yeah, the biggest bit of advice I'd give to anybody is to keep going. Because, I think it's so easy to be in a position where things are hard and to think that there's something wrong with you. You look around, it's like you're in a race, I don't know if you're a runner, but if you're in a race, and you look around, everybody else looks great and you're suffering, and you're wondering, what's wrong with me? But they're suffering too. It's very easy right now to look around and think, oh, other people have it easy, because you're suffering, it's certainly true. That life is not equally hard for everybody. But it is true that it is actually anybody who's doing something interesting and new, it is also hard for them. Elon Musk, I'm sure he has had some very dark moments in his life. Apparently, he was very close at one point. I think SpaceX, they were like, a few hours away from going out of business. If somebody didn't come through, I think it was either SpaceX or Tesla. He convinced his girlfriend's parents to mortgage their house or something to get a little bit of extra money and it was really on the edge. This goes back to only hearing about the success stories but it was like really touch-and-go. It's easy to think that 'Oh, well. It's not for me, life's not fair, whatever, and I'll just go back.' But no, I would say keep going. That's the number one thing is to keep going. Because it is actually hard for everyone. I can't tell you how many times... when I started Aigora, in the first few months, there's this like soul sucking sickness in my stomach. I just felt so empty. You're trying to create something new. You're trying to bring something new to the world, not everybody gets it. You try to convince people to give you money for this new thing. It's hard and that's just the way that is.
Jared Simmons 26:53
That is so true. Your description is just the perfect one of that feeling. The ups and the downs. People talk about the ups that doesn't go unreported or undiscussed, but it's those downs that you're talking about. It's great point about the race analogy is a great one. Because when you hear people talking, they're talking about their ups but you don't think about who's not talking at the moment and what they might be going through at the moment. That is great advice. Keep going. That is wonderful advice.
Dr. John Ennis 27:24
You can do it. You really can do it. Keep going. Just like dig down, you can do it. You're capable of a lot more you think you are and keep going.
Jared Simmons 27:32
That's really important.
Dr. John Ennis 27:35
Another one is get a coach, get somebody who has been through this actually, you and I both work with it. Just a little shout out to David Fields who work with you Jared. He is my coach. I think he's your coach also, Jared. He is an excellent coach and finding somebody, they don't have to necessarily work in the area, but someone who's been through the process of building something. Who can guide you, who has some structures and some experience, that makes a big difference than having somebody to talk to because it gets very lonely a lot of times. If you're on if you're on the frontier, doing something new, you're probably out there by yourself.
Dr. John Ennis 28:12
Network is another one, I would say, talk to people and talk to everybody about what you're doing because you don't know, and ask people to introduce you. Like you're saying, 'Here's my thing. Can I show you my thing? And you're like, Okay, what do you think?' You get feedback. Then you say, 'is there anybody you know, that you think would like to see this or whether it could give us feedback or whatever?' Socialize as much as possible, don't hold on to it, don't try to perfect it in secret and then release it. Talk to everybody because the fact is that if it's really a new idea, you're gonna have a hard enough time getting anybody like it, no one's gonna steal your idea.
Jared Simmons 28:46
Exactly and that is the one. I mean, I wish I'd heard everything you just said six years ago, when I was starting out. The most critical mistake, the big mistake I made was not talking more about what I was doing and building. I feel like there's two kinds of modes that people get into that drive that. My mode was, it's not good enough to bother people with. The other mode is; I don't want someone to steal this. I have to keep this under wraps because it is valuable. It's almost like some people hold back because they don't think it's valuable enough and some people hold back because of the value they see in it.
Dr. John Ennis 29:29
Hmm, that's interesting.
Jared Simmons 29:30
Neither approaches are right. It's helpful, I should say. In 2021, with the technology and the connectedness that we have as a society, sharing what you're thinking is very low risk. You and I are essentially consultants and we trade in ideas. A podcast, your podcast, Aigoracast, this podcast, conceptually could be viewed as Oh, why are you giving away what you know about innovation? Why are you giving away about what you know about your space for free? People can just listen to the podcast; they won't call you. That's not a method of thinking anymore in this space but there's still pockets of that in other industries and other domains where people are still thinking, I can't share this, I can't talk about this, I have to get it patented. I have to get a copyright. I have to do this. I have to protect it. Putting it out there does what you know, you and I do for each other, which is you share idea with me and it sparks thought in my head, I share an idea with you and it sparks thoughts in your head and we go off with our new different better ideas and do things with them. That has been slow to take hold in more product based and service in non-professional service based organizations.
Dr. John Ennis 30:44
That's interesting. There's a lot of what you just said that. Let's go through the various things that you said, because you are very interesting. The first one is that as far as not wanting to bother people about your ideas and I would expect you to agree with me on this, that personally, any person who is sincerely trying to improve themselves with their lives, I will help. From the bottom of my soul, I have nothing but respect for people who are trying to improve their lives. If someone contacts me, someone reached out on Twitter, they're trying to learn Clarity, which is a web three programming language for Stacks, which is actually very good, interesting platform. Anyway, they contacted me, they have been doing stuff for like two months, they wanted to get some advice about doing something I said, sure, let's have a call. Then I gave them a little project to do and we might end up hiring them and it's because they had to be initiative to reach out. This is a person... previously they owned fencing company. Now they're transitioning to be a web developer. I'm happy to support someone like that. That is a good thing. I, of course, gonna help somebody like that. Another thing is, if you reached out to lunch people and no one want to get back to you. Who cares? They weren't talking to you anyway.
Jared Simmons 31:58
Exactly. If you haven't lost anything.
Dr. John Ennis 32:01
Even having a relationship to no relationship. Especially as you mentioned, with technology, you've got LinkedIn. I send connection requests every day to at least five people. I've searched if you have common interests, constantly trying to connect with people. Meeting people, ask for introductions, that's one. Twitter, you're have to be careful, you have to mute topics, because you can get sucked into abstractions on Twitter but if you use it for professional purposes, very clear guardrails. I think it can be really good. That's for networking, you can meet really interesting people, especially with COVID now, you don't have to be in San Francisco, if you want to do tech, you can be anywhere. You can have a phone call.
Dr. John Ennis 32:36
On the other side about protecting your idea. The fact is that if you're passionate about an idea, and you are a talented person, which most people are. Most people are talented at the thing they're passionate about, for whatever reason, the universe has blessed us, it doesn't really curse us with passion for things that we account for. If you really care about something and you're working on it; first off the people who might be with you are probably doing something else anyway. Why would they stop doing something that's productive to do something that's untested? There's no guarantee that what you're doing is going to work out so why would they stop doing what they're doing to do what you're gonna do? Really good ideas, it's not obviously gonna work out because they're new so they probably not. Even if people copy you, and we're going through this now, because we have a new, we have a new algorithm for optimizing trades between large groups of people that we're working on this, that's why we're doing web three stuff. We're meeting people, and it is nerve wracking, because you think, 'Oh, what if someone's gonna steal my idea or do the same or whatever?' It could happen, but they'll do it differently. They'll end up working in some other part of the space. It's a giant world. If your idea is really creating value, even if other people do it, it's not like anybody can capture all the value, there was a giant world. You can be a little bit strategic and start... One good bit of advice that I think I got from Seth Godin gives the advice that you should strive to be in the largest pond in which you are still the largest fish, trying to niche down with your use case or whatever, to the point that you have the best solution in the space, whatever the space is, so that people who are in that space can find you, because globally now, it's so interconnected. If you can go to a bigger pond and still be the biggest fish then that's good, but when you're starting get your niche down, so that, your use case is so well defined that for that use case, you are the obvious choice, and then grow it out, that would be something else. No one can capture all the value in the world. Share your idea, people will do something else. Have faith in your ability to come up with new things, because you will.
Jared Simmons 34:43
The scarcity mindset that underlies that way of thinking, it's a great point.
Dr. John Ennis 34:48
Like you and I, if we say something interesting on the show, and somebody wants to say hi, their problem will interact with our knowledge in some new way. We'll have some extra insights for them so it's not it's not like this everything I know.
Jared Simmons 35:05
Dr. John Ennis, thank you so much for your time and your thoughts and your perspective. All the best to you and everything you're building at Aigora and please check his own podcast, Aigoracast. He let me in for an episode. So thank you so much for your time and we'll have to do this again soon.
Dr. John Ennis 35:27
Oh, it sounds good. Let me just say Aigor.ai is our company. If you're in food, beverage, ingredient, any kind of consumer facing product, check out Aigora.ai. We help centering consumer science teams implement artificial intelligence. That's our business.
Jared Simmons 35:42
Thank you so much and like I said, we'll talk again soon. Thanks for your sharing.
Dr. John Ennis 35:47
It's a pleasure. Thanks a lot Jared.
Jared Simmons 35:48
All right. Take care.
Jared Simmons 35:49
All right. Take care. 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