In Part 1 of our Innovation Roundtable series, the participants explored the possibilities of transformational innovation. In Part 2, the roundtable discussed the aspects of attaining sustainable innovation on the spectrum of “zero to one.” The concept of “zero to one” innovation, as described in Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One, is the idea of creating something new and unique, rather than simply copying something that already exists.
Here in Part 3 of the series, the roundtable participants discuss the human element of innovation. With AI influencing tools, systems and frameworks, how can humans evolve to continue learning and leading the way when it comes to transformational innovation?
Seth Adler, Head of IMI Media at Informa, brought together an impressive group of nine innovation experts from diverse fields to explore these issues. All Things Innovation would like to thank them for their innovation and insights expertise:
- Tammy Butterworth, Product Innovation Director at Welch’s
- Lisa Costello, Director, Head of Platform, Prologis Ventures at Prologis
- Milan Ivosevic, VP of R&D and Innovations at CooperSurgical
- Prapti Jha, former Design Strategy & Research, Design Thinking & Innovation at Harvard University
- Cherie Leonard, Head of North America Insights at Colgate-Palmolive
- Nevada Sanchez, Co-Founder and Vice President of Core Technology at Butterfly Network, Inc.
- Michele Sandoval, Director of Innovation at E&J Gallo Winery
- Leslie Shannon, Head of Trend and Innovation Scouting at Nokia
- Harsh Wardhan, Innovation Lead, Design Strategist at Google
Roundtable Part 3: Measuring the Human Element
Seth Adler: Let’s bring up humans. We’ve looked at GenAI as a tool. And we’ve explored how to strategically take innovation from zero to N. Now we know we’re going in the right direction. How do we evolve?
Cherie Leonard: I think it goes back to something Tammy mentioned earlier, about starting with the internal process. I think there’s an incredible importance of having people along for the journey and creating a sense of empowerment, whatever that might look like. Especially as it comes to the diversity of thinking. One of the presentations this morning at FEI talked about GenAI as the engine of innovation. And one of the key kinds of areas in the journey was making sure you have diversity. I think it said anytime and always or something to that extent. But to me it was not just about the technical diversity of the models for the things that you’re trying to evolve, but it’s the human diversity around the table.
If you think about this group here, we’re all coming from different places. A similar interest in innovation with extraordinarily different experiences, different industries, different challenges. And I think creating the space for that human interaction and discussion will be critical just to continue to evolve the richness and ultimately the actionability of any of this. Because if it’s not actionable, you can’t make decisions or it’s not driving a business forward. What’s the point?
Adler: Michele, it feels like spirits is very human in the way that you run the organization.
Michele Sandoval: That was the first thing I thought of. I was reacting, you’re talking about this in the context of the business and the business framework, and the first place my mind went to was the consumer. Being in the alcohol beverage industry, that’s part of our company mantra, which is we serve people. Joy and the moments that matter. It’s about the consumer. When I think about the role of innovation and what we’re doing, it’s to serve them. It’s to be at their behest, and yes, all this other stuff matters, but how can we as innovators think about the consumer every step of the way throughout the process? We try to put that mindset even into the folks that run the bottling lines, the folks that pick the grapes, the winemakers that make the wine. How do you make sure that stays at the forefront?
Tammy Butterworth: Absolutely. I work in R& D and I’m designing products for humans. Everything we do is human centered. And we think beyond just the product, to the experience. So, to what Michele was just saying, if they see it on a shelf. Why are they picking it up? What are they going to do with it? What problem are we solving for them? How are we doing it differently so that they want to buy our product and not someone else’s? We’re always thinking about that human experience. We’re humans designing it as well, and we touched on AI. We’re going to use AI to augment what we do, to make us faster, to help us get to what are some of the questions that we need to answer, or what are some of the hypotheses, so that we get there faster, so we can design a product for that experience.
Nevada Sanchez: We have the benefit of a product needing a human to work. I mean, there’s really two different people involved in the value that we’re delivering. On the one hand, our customer is able to do their job better, easier, get better insights. Just as important as that, and maybe even more so is the first time they’re actually helping. And that human touch has probably been one of the most motivating factors for a lot of people that continues to work and advance our mission. Some of the stories that you get are pretty incredible.
A nurse took their device home just to practice getting better at imaging and found a cancer in her daughter’s kidney that would have been a big problem if she hadn’t seen it. I hear those stories every day. You can also see some of the work that we’ve done bringing things to low- and middle-income countries, we put a thousand devices in Kenya and seeing just the way we’ve impacted their lives by bringing this capability to them is pretty impactful. That human connection is incredibly important to our mission, but also for the people that work with us in advancing our mission.
Lisa Costello: We work in supply chain, so we’re always thinking about our customers that are in our warehouses trying to operate these facilities and the ebb and flow of human workforces and what they’re able to get access to. During the pandemic, it was a lot lower. They were starting to get really excited about robotics machines. Now it’s equalizing a bit more. Now they’re not spending as much. We’re constantly tracking that. And I think it’s always going to be a collaboration between humans and machines doing the work. Back to the crisis mentality, there’s going to be opportunities to bring in more or less depending on what’s happening in our wider market.
Milan Ivosevic: I hope so. This year, our plenary panel hit on human centered design. It hit the core of this. I was there with my colleagues from CooperSurgical, we are positioned as a fertility company that helps families and couples getting babies. It doesn’t get more human than that and I can tell you this really comes to the essence of who we are as humans. Imagine if you have family or couples they want to build a family and they can’t and then you go there and you help them, it’s so rewarding. It’s very emotional. Empathy plays a big part.
Prapti Jha: Maybe because we’re living in a world where we can be proven wrong anytime. And I totally take that assumption. But from what I see and feel right now, I have this bias that I feel a machine cannot have the same level of empathy like a human. Because as humans, we are just a different organism. It’s we see stuff. We shift our thoughts and mindset. According to that, whatever machine would do is like what we feed into it. And then from all the so-called case studies or how humans have reacted in the past, and then that machine would react for you if it is being empathetic. But that’s a horror for me, just because of the area I work in, it’s like a machine would provide that level of empathy because that’s so core to being a human. And then I would ask the question, then why would humans exist? That’s one of the biggest strengths that we as humans have.
Leonard: The idea, obviously, we talk a lot about people centricity, in the business and making sure that everyone around the table, no matter the function, is empowered for that. But I think also part of the beauty and what we’ve heard these stories of people being human is that you can’t always predict. We say one thing, we do another, or emotions, motivations shift over time, and I think that’s something, and hearing you talk, AI at the moment can’t replicate that, so that gives a reason for being, for all of us being humans around the table. Interacting with family and friends and all those things that make life meaningful.
Ivosevic: Aren’t we so subjective about humans? We all fear that these things will never go there, but my biggest fear is not will the machine feel it, really, but the machine can mimic and express that feeling, it can get trained how to talk and can express it, even if it’s not really feeling down in the core, and that can manipulate a lot of things and steer it in a very wrong direction.
Jha: Absolutely, that’s going to happen. It would be just those situations where the machine is not trained on, that’s when you would know, oh, this is the machine’s reaction, or it’s a human’s reaction. We are going to get there. We’ll come back to this roundtable and see how the world is right now.
Adler: It does feel like at least you brought up, that’s going to be the combination of humans and artificial intelligence. The phrase collective intelligence feels like that’s what maybe the theme of FEI 2025 will be, is how can we marry our humanity. How can we find the lane for our humanity with the ever-expanding capabilities of artificial intelligence?
Leslie Shannon: This year at FEI 2024, you asked me to speak about virtual natives, which is the topic of people born since 2000 and how they’re different from those before and they have a very different way of looking at things. They are extremely digital savvy, and it goes beyond that. But they look at things differently and they’re willing to challenge. They’re willing to see things that are inefficient and they’re like, that’s ridiculous. I’m not doing that. And so they’re actually going to be upending things and disrupting things and making them more human.
That’s one of the big things that is coming out of this generation. And so I am really encouraged. One of the things we’ve done at Nokia is we’ve taken some actual virtual natives and we brought them together in groups and given them problems within the company and asked for their opinion and then had them present to senior leadership because we find that they’re extremely fresh out of the box. Thinking helps us be better. And hiring younger people, creating workspaces that are what they expect and then listening to them. That actually has guided us towards more humanity in our workplace.
Harsh Wardhan: This whole conversation about digital natives is so fascinating. I’ll give you an example of a kid. We were talking about getting the feeling of writing on the tablets and paper. This kid uses an iPad to sketch and they’re amazing artists blowing up on Instagram. And I was watching them draw. Tell me about this. How do you feel about drawing on iPad? And they, they were like, yes, it’s good. It’s amazing. I mean, it is what it is. I was like, don’t you feel the need of that friction or tactile feedback when you are drawing on iPad? And they were like, no, why would I need that?
My mind was blown at that moment because it is something that we expect because we have written on paper and that’s how we started, that’s how we started our lives and education. And they’re like, no, this is amazing, I can actually change pens and I can do this and that. Then they started showing me that. It made me feel we must think differently for these folks who in their language are built different.
Since you gave me the opportunity to talk, I’ve been bottling these things up as everybody was talking, going back to the human centered aspect of it. When you think about innovation at its core definition, there are three things. Not human centered innovation. There’s business, there’s technology, and there’s desirability. And for those of you who recognize the DVF framework, I think we have been losing out on the desirability aspect.
We are over indexing on building the technology. Still is, it’s still happening even though we preach, we talk, and so on. We speak at conferences, it’s still happening. And then we want to make money. Everybody wants to make money. Who doesn’t? So we are forgetting about people, what people actually want.
And I’ll say this last thing. Why it is important to think about desirability is because it’s like you are hosting a vegan group of people and you make chicken tikka masala for them. That’s the worst thing that you can do to them if you don’t have the right menu. We don’t want to do that. That’s why we need empathy. And we don’t really need empathy by building products and services. You need it throughout the process. Because you said, for couples who are trying to bear a child. It’s not just that you give them injections and if you give them whatever they need, that’s not it. You have to be a human with them. You have to understand the feeling that they’re going through, whether you have a child or not.
Shannon: And I would say you need to treat your employees with empathy as well.
Wardhan: Exactly. It has to be in the system. And that’s what AI is missing right now.
Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for more posts featuring All Things Innovation’s roundtable discussion on transformational innovation.
