Challenging the Innovation Mindset

A mind map illustration depicting a human brain with various thought bubbles connected to it.

At FEI25, Harpalani conducted the workshop, “Silent Collaboration: Challenging Habitual Thinking, Constraints & Inefficiencies,” in tandem with Vibha Tourani, Researcher, PlayMatters (ED-Tech) at International Rescue Committee (IRC). The aim was to challenge habitual thinking and spark collaboration through a tactile, creative exercise—followed by a fast-paced innovation sprint addressing a real-world systemic issue.

The objective was to build trust and energy through teamwork, as well as explore constraints and inefficiencies in everyday systems; create a bold alternative through group imagination and storytelling; and inspire new ideas based on real human-centered challenges.

Thinking Differently

The workshop was a fun take on defeating habitual thinking. Can you just tell us about that aspect of habitual thinking and how it pertains to innovation?

“The whole goal of this workshop is challenging the normal way of thinking,” relates Harpalani. “Our mind is trained to think in a certain way. This workshop, in a way, helps us to think differently, and the whole purpose is that we’re not focusing on solutions, but how are we challenging our minds to think in a unique way so that we can get unique solutions. It doesn’t matter if they’re right or wrong. Challenging habitual thinking is what our workshop is focused around, where basically our intention is to have different personas in the room and how would you solve for each of the different personas.”

This is a lesson that really any innovator can learn from.

Harpalani adds, “What we want the participants to do is once they do our exercise and think differently, we want them to take those methods back to their organization and use the same methods. The way the workshop is designed is that we don’t focus on the problem right away, but we basically become creative with certain icebreaker exercises and then dive deeper into the problem afterwards. The icebreaker exercise helps us to ignite creativity and ignite our brain cells way before we dive into that problem.”

She continues, “How can we think about each individual in the room because as a company, as an organization, I feel we are very much focused in particular on a certain set of stakeholders or an audience that we are always trying to solve for. But this workshop actually challenged us to think of all the stakeholders in the room and think it from their perspective rather than just focusing on one particular domain, and take this whole approach in a holistic way.”

Igniting Human Creativity

Speaking of thought process, FEI25 was structured on the themes of human intelligence, artificial intelligence, and then collective intelligence. What does collective intelligence mean to you and your organization?

“To me, collective intelligence is a hybrid of using AI and human creativity,” says Harpalani. “What I’ve been hearing is how can we use AI to leverage the productivity that we have? One of the biggest insights I heard is that AI can be used to speed up your productivity, but not your creativity. So let AI be productive for you and help serve you, but not let AI take on the ability to think differently and be inspirational because that’s something that only you can do, and that’s the power of human intelligence. Collective intelligence is a very good and mixed combination of these two aspects. At the same time, human beings are aware of when we are applying AI in our field and using it in a very directional and focused way to achieve what we want.”

Defining the Link Between AI & Innovation

Illustration of a man and woman faces in profile, swirling ribbons of light, defining consciousness.

The keynote was a fascinating perspective on artificial intelligence, as Bagalman and the other speakers examined the concept of AI and machine learning through the lens of data science, neuroscience, and cognitive science. The presentation also included Dr. Aaron Mattfeld, Director, Neuroscience of Memory and Development (MaD Lab) at Florida International University; and Inna Khazan, Author, The Clinical Handbook of Biofeedback, Instructor, Harvard Medical School.

As corporate debate surrounding AI intensifies, the session further explored the distinctions drawn by relevant scientific disciplines concerning consciousness, thereby facilitating more informed decision-making for business leaders. By bringing together experts from diverse fields, it aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of current understandings and debates around consciousness.

Welcome to the Machine

Consciousness is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that remains a central question in science and philosophy. And now we have the rise of AI, bringing machine learning into the debate. Just tell us a little bit, from your perspective, this idea of consciousness and AI.

“It was a fascinating panel to have with the perspective of a neuroscientist, a psychologist and I’m just a little data scientist talking about algorithms,” says Bagalman. “The point was, you hear all this buzz about AGI, artificial general intelligence, and are we going to have machines that are thinking and conscious? And my answer is no. We put in inputs. There’s an algorithm. You get outputs. It is designed to seem very humanlike. But honestly, I gave the analogy that I put inputs into a vending machine. I put a dollar in, I hit the b, I hit the five, and then it gives me back a bag of Cheetos. I don’t sit around wondering what does it think about those Cheetos. One day, perhaps. But right now, the large language models that we have, they are machines. They output text, but they’re not thinking. They don’t have awareness of themselves.”

Expanding the AI Toolkit

At FEI this year, the days were split up into themes, such as an AI day, a human insights and human intelligence day. What are your thoughts about the collective intelligence theme for the third day and how it impacts you and your organization?

Bagalman relates, “Collective intelligence is what we need. Right? AI is a tool. It’s a powerful tool. You think about other tools. The invention of the wheel, fire, writing. These things have become integral not just to particular tasks, but to the way we set up our lives and the way we do business. We’re going to see that with AI. I spend half of my time downplaying to people that when you hear we’re about to have sentient AI, that’s someone who’s trying to raise venture capital money. The other half of my time, I spend explaining to people who aren’t using AI, no. This is the big new tool of this generation. We have to learn how to use it, how to incorporate it into our workflow, into our decision-making processes.”

He adds, “When you combine what you can get out of an AI tool that can look at so many data sources at once, that can help you view things from other perspectives, that can help you edit your writing, that can help you write a love poem to someone. Whatever it might be, the AI is a tool that can help us do things better and more efficiently, not replace those things.”

Pairing Data Science & Innovation

With AI becoming an important part of the tool kit for the modern-day innovator, just what about data science? What relationship does data science have with innovation?

“Data science has always been key to innovation ever since we developed the scientific method,” asserts Bagalman. “A key part of the scientific method is to run experiments and collect data. We may not have called it data science back then. We may not have been as sophisticated as we are now, but it’s always been there. And being able to look at data is what data science is about. It’s the science of managing and drawing inferences from data. And AI extends our ability in that tremendously.”

It brings us back to that thought process of collective intelligence, data science and innovation—and strengthening that partnership for the future of the innovation field.

Bagalman adds, “Is AI eventually going to be able to replace me? Maybe. Certainly, it’ll replace a lot of the things I do. I think we’re going to replace a lot of the time that my team and I spend writing code. I think it’s going to help us understand much more complicated data. It’s not about big data anymore. These days, it’s really about complicated data. AI can do that so much better for us if you’re trying to analyze data. Let’s say you’re trying to analyze social media data. For 15 years now, we’ve had tools that go through social media posts and tell you how many of them were positive about your brand or how many were negative about your brand, but there wasn’t that much that it could do. A large language model, it can be like a person reading it all for you and telling you insights that it drew from that. It’s a huge step forward.”

AI’s Impact on the Innovator’s Role

Man high on a peak or cliff balancing among the clouds.

Nair led one of the show’s proxy meetings, on “AI Impact: The Innovator’s Role in Protecting Against Cognitive Decay.” The discussion centered on AI’s impact on organizational human cognition. Nair explored how AI’s convenience fosters cognitive offloading, hindering critical thinking. Nair delved into the “editor not creator” paradigm, where reliance on machine information diminishes original thought. He also proposed strategies to counteract these effects, emphasizing self-governance and mindful technology integration, crucial for maintaining cognitive health in the age of AI.

On Machines and Humans

Your conversation and discussion at FEI focused on the current obsession with AI and the curse of convenience, as well as what you called cognitive decay. Can you tell us more about your exploration with AI?

“In my work that I’ve been doing for the last five years,” says Nair, “I’ve concentrated on my innovation work as well as the implications of what excessive use of AI does to the innovative mind. What I’ve concluded in the first stage is that there is some impact to just general intelligence in the overuse, obsessive use of generative AI, if not a warning label. Now before I even continue, I’m an AI enthusiast. I really grew up in the field of computer science for almost thirty years framing the question of what makes you human if the machine grows. Well, the time has come where the machine has grown to a point of adulthood.”

He continues, “The question is, what makes us more human now? Because everything we think that makes us human seems to be adaptable to a machine now. And the question is, where is that Venn diagram? And where do we belong? This proxy meeting is just a way of getting people’s input on that story. Again, I’m an enthusiast. I really believe the advanced technologies that we have are going to be incredibly transformative, not just to innovation but to everything that we think of as life. The careful use of it allows me to ask some deeper questions about when and where and how to apply it. So that’s what this proxy meeting brought about.”

Finding the Right Balance

Interestingly, today at FEI we held the theme of human insights day. Tomorrow will be about AI. What are your thoughts on this idea of collective intelligence? What does that mean to you and your organization?

“Collective intelligence is defined in many different ways,” observes Nair. “The way that I interpret it for my own edification is that it’s the seesaw between your human self and your machine self and how to manage that. What is that fulcrum that balances both of those well? So far, I’m seeing a lean towards machine intelligence being the heavier of the two, and humans just trying to adapt.”

He adds, “At this point, I think we need to move the balance carefully because we have to train, we have to engage, and we have to inspire humanity to participate with a new species that I think is coming about. The reason I use the word species versus a machine is because well, a machine can be a species, I guess, but it is because we are having job losses because machines can do the work better. The reality is jobs may be taken away in place of machines.”

“Corporations are saying, justify to me why a machine can’t do it, then I will hire a person,” relates Nair. “It’s kind of ironic, right? Before it was the other way around. When we reach a world where we are really competing for jobs with machines, we need to understand what we bring to the picture in the balance between us and AI machines. And that is a formative discussion, one that has a great deal of research and work to be done, but also to experience. We don’t know where the warning labels begin and where they end. And that edge is where I live.”

The Realities of the Rogue Mindset

Is the innovation field under pressure by AI, lack of resources, budgets, all these human resources? Yet, we had this rogue mindset presentation at FEI about how humans should push the boundaries of curiosity and creativity. What were some of your takeaways on the rogue mindset concept?

“First of all, I like the idea of rogue mindset,” says Nair. “I like the concept, but it is one that requires us to overcome one of the biggest problems as an innovator in a larger company. Now if, like myself, I reported to the CEO, I had direct access, I had influence, I had a budget. The rogue mindset is a convenience. I can do that because they are paying you to be contrarian, to build a transformative future. But even with my experiences, I had to satisfy the hunger of the status quo using my methods. I had to feed the meat of today to get the fruits of tomorrow. For me to play in that future game, I had to satisfy the energies today. Now if you have three levels below an executive, or one level below an executive, and you’re trying to sell the CFO and you’re trying to sell, where does the rogue mindset participate?”

Is the rogue mindset an asset for innovation? Or, perhaps, there is an aspect of risk to the concept as well if you work in a corporate environment.

“I think the rogue mindset is a mindset that you keep, not a mindset you express,” says Nair. “If you express it too loudly without having the concrete assets you provide for today, you’re running the risk. The mindset begins with you not being your own worst coward. Stop talking to yourself that you can’t do it. Start with the inspired future. Meditate on your own capacity and your own capacity to produce the future. And then act on it. Produce the results that would be satisfying, maybe in the long term, but also serve the present with your short term. And understand the dance between the status quo and transformation. Because sometimes people can’t see it. So the rogue mindset is not about suddenly becoming a rogue or going rogue. I think that would be unfair and insensitive for us to recommend to our members.”

The Art & Science of Innovation

You brought up this balance between these different factors and that you need that safe environment, that safe psychological space as well to experiment and to take the risk—but still be within the framework of aligning to business strategies.

“Fear is the number one cause of anything not being innovated upon. And it’s human fear. It’s fear of loss of your job. McKinsey had a study on this. Fear of loss of job, fear of humiliation, and one other fear, I guess, you can create in your mind. Everything starts and stops in your mind. I understand. The mind of the innovator is the most precious commodity in a business. However, the threat to the status quo affects a lot more lives than the beauty of the future,” says Nair.

Nair relates, “One must understand how to balance the two. One must be very nuanced in the art form. And this idea of coming out of a conference like FEI and getting all excited because you talk to ten other people like you, you go back in the office and you start acting rogue—what happens? You have to learn to be smart about it. You have to be a polite yet effective innovator. And you have to give space for others. But if you are selling fearlessness, you can’t have it inside you. It doesn’t work.”

Does More Regulation Help or Hurt Innovation?

A variety of makeup and application brushes.

This sweeping legislation, passed in late 2022 and now phased in, brings serious changes to how personal care products are developed, manufactured, and monitored in the U.S. It applies to a vast array of everyday products that most of us take for granted: your body lotion, shaving cream, makeup, face masks, and more.

Before MoCRA, the FDA had surprisingly limited authority over personal care products. Unlike drugs or medical devices, cosmetic products didn’t require premarket approval. For most items, there was no mandate for safety testing, no facility registration, and no system in place to report or track adverse reactions.

Take body lotion, for example. Unless the product made specific therapeutic claims (e.g., “heals eczema”), it wasn’t subject to rigorous scrutiny. Manufacturers often relied on Certificates of Analysis (COAs) from raw ingredient suppliers to validate safety, rather than conducting full clinical or toxicological tests. Major multinational personal care companies routinely performed additional safety evaluations, but many small-to-medium-sized brands did not. Who did, who didn’t? As a consumer, you probably wouldn’t know.

Contrast this with over-the-counter (OTC) personal care products, such as sunscreens, anti-dandruff shampoos, or fluoride toothpastes. These fall under FDA monographs—essentially a rulebook that defines acceptable ingredients, concentrations, labeling, and usage guidelines. Sunscreens, for example, may appear similar to body lotions, but they are treated entirely differently from a regulatory standpoint—they are regulated like drugs due to their interaction with the body, specifically their ability to protect against UV radiation, requiring them to follow a much more controlled regulatory process. (protecting against UV radiation).

That’s what makes MoCRA such a seismic shift. For the first time, all cosmetics and personal care manufacturers must:

  • Register their manufacturing facilities with the FDA
  • List every marketed product and its ingredients
  • Substantiate product safety with robust data
  • Report serious adverse events
  • Comply with Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs)

These are major asks, especially for smaller brands or independent startups that don’t have in-house regulatory teams.

So, that brings us to the big question:

Does More Regulation Help or Hurt Innovation?

The instinctive answer from many in industry might be “hurt.” More red tape, more cost, more time, more hurdles to getting a product to market. But the reality is more nuanced—and, arguably, more optimistic.

Yes, MoCRA raises the bar. Compliance requires investment in systems, documentation, testing, and traceability. It slows down the “move fast and break things” style of product development that some niche brands once leaned on.

But here’s the flip side: regulation creates pressure that fuels innovation.

Companies now need to find faster, more reliable, and more scalable ways to ensure product safety and compliance. That’s driving a wave of technological advancement behind the scenes—especially in AI, biotech, and digital infrastructure.

Consider the new wave of AI-powered formulation and compliance tools. Platforms like Centric Software, QT9 QMS, SmarterX, and Good Face Project are now helping brands:

  • Automatically flag non-compliant ingredients across markets
  • Simulate product safety using predictive modeling
  • Maintain audit-ready documentation across multiple SKUs
  • Track ingredient sourcing through blockchain-enabled traceability

Without MoCRA pushing the regulatory envelope, many of these capabilities might have remained niche or underdeveloped. Now, they’re becoming essential.

Here’s where it gets exciting: These tools aren’t just about compliance. They unlock new opportunities for innovation.

When your ingredient data is centralized and structured, it becomes easier to:

  • Test new combinations quickly
  • Design products for specific skin types or conditions
  • Scale personalized beauty experiences
  • Shorten the time from idea to shelf—without sacrificing safety

We’re already seeing early signs of this with the growth of biotech-driven skincare, microbiome-friendly formulations, and AI-driven product personalization.

A New Era for Product Developers

For the product developers in the personal care space, the journey has fundamentally changed.

Old Model:

  • Get a trending ingredient
  • Build a formula
  • Do minimal stability and safety testing
  • Launch fast, iterate if needed

New Model:

  • Start with regulatory-compliant ingredients
  • Use AI platforms to assess safety, compliance, and efficacy from day one
  • Collaborate with QA, regulatory, and marketing teams earlier
  • Design products that are not just safe, but provably safe
  • Build documentation and traceability into every phase

This might seem like a burden, but it’s also an opportunity for product teams to gain more strategic influence within their companies. Innovation now means not just finding the next trendy ingredient, but designing responsibly, sustainably, and inclusively—all while staying ahead of evolving regulations.

In many ways, MoCRA is forcing the industry to grow up. And with maturity comes systems, structure, and yes—space to innovate.

So, does more regulation help or hurt innovation? When it’s designed well and paired with the right tools, regulation doesn’t stifle innovation—it shapes it. It gives it purpose, discipline, and ultimately, greater impact.

That said, recent leadership changes and staffing reductions at the FDA have introduced new uncertainty. While MoCRA remains legally in effect and the agency has demonstrated early enforcement, the loss of experienced personnel and administrative restructuring may delay the development of additional guidance and weaken oversight.

For brands, this means staying proactive. MoCRA compliance is not a box to check—it’s a framework for responsible innovation. And in a time of political flux, companies that build the systems, documentation, and agility to exceed the baseline will be the ones best positioned to lead.

Click here for more columns by Gail Martino; if you enjoy this content, please consider connecting with Gail Martino on LinkedIn.

Leading Product Innovation with Insights

Roasted sausages artfully presented on a plate, with one cut open.

Curtin, along with Karen Kraft, Associate Director, Consumer Insights & Analytics at Johnsonville, held the session, “Revolutionizing Product Innovation through Radical Consumer Empathy,” at FEI25. The audience was invited to learn how Johnsonville developed their innovation strategy through whitespace identification, breakthrough ideation and successful product launches, such as its recent summer sausage campaign.

The presentation at FEI highlighted your work with Johnsonville, and featured what you could call a strategic roadmap to developing a company’s next big innovation, through radical consumer empathy. Can you share more with us about the meaning of radical consumer empathy?

“We’re here at Front End of Innovation 2025, and we see a lot of innovation where you’ve got great ideas that come out of that development process,” says Curtin. “But just because it’s a great idea doesn’t mean it has its place in the market, and so for us, insights-led innovation is critical. Insights-led innovation leads to innovation that is transformational, often breakthrough, but innovation that changes the trajectory of a brand or an organization.”

When you say breakthrough or disruptive innovation, what comes to mind is the days of the lone genius working late into the night in his or her garage. Is that kind of gone from corporate innovation now? Is it all very data and insights driven now?

Curtin observes, “I don’t know that it’s all data driven. I think when you have data-driven innovation, it becomes a little bit too closed in. I do think you need the opportunity to go wild and really push boundaries. But at the same time, when you come up with these ideas, I think being able to tie them back to the business need or the consumer opportunity is critical to success.”

Pushing the Boundaries of Innovation

Speaking of pushing boundaries, this morning FEI held its keynote and roundtables featuring the Rogue Mindset framework. What does the rogue mindset in innovation mean to you?

“For us, I think we’ve been practicing this for over twenty years now,” says Curtin. “Prodigy Works actually started out as a partnership with Mensa, the High IQ Society, and a global network of high IQ geniuses, creative geniuses, and just the most curious people and passionate problem solvers. For years, we’ve really believed that to get outside of the box thinking, you need to go way outside of the box, and you need to create these combinations of people from very different backgrounds and very different perspectives.”

He adds, “This is beyond sort of internal cross functional relationships within innovation initiatives. This takes that notion and brings it even further to be able to bring in that outside thinking. Now, if you can do that in a way that’s aligned with those consumer trends, those business needs, I think that’s when you really identify those perfect opportunities for businesses to succeed.”

Improving Innovation Impact

Variety of colored paints impacting or exploding outwards on a white background.

The FEI Honors event celebrated the accomplishments of a distinguished roster of innovators in business and academia, including Linda Hill, Rita McGrath, Michael Tushman, Panos Panay, Steve Blank and Steve Wozniak. Just what do these innovation luminaries mean to you and the innovation community at large?

“The FEI Honors event is where we are going to recognize what we call innovation luminaries,” says Ivosevic. “These are thought leaders and authorities who actually help us get to this point, help us clarify a little bit of that fuzzy front end of innovation, brought some structure to our processes and methodologies, and showed us ways in which we can innovate. We have reached this point in the community. So now we are bringing them back, and we are asking them, in this ever-changing world of an abundance of information, AI, and the changes that we are experiencing, are there some new frameworks and thoughts from your perspective that are different today and will help us move forward from what we learned from you in the past.”

Taking a Holistic Approach to the Front-End of Innovation

All of these FEI Honors luminaries have certainly made an impact on the innovation community in some way, whether it’s through industry, business or academics. Why don’t you tell us just a little bit about your session at FEI, which also has to do with impact? In fact, it’s called “Improving Innovation Impact.”

“I’m hosting a workshop called ‘Improving Innovation Impact,’ says Ivosevic. “We all know that the front end of innovation is actually a lot of fun, very creative, we generate a lot of ideas, we cross-pollinate, we bring cross-functional teams into the process, we look at different perspectives, and we come up with different concepts and ideas. The ultimate goal is that these initiatives will lead to an outcome or successful profitable product.”

He continues, “The real question is from this front end, and focusing and having fun on the front end, how we can actually maximize the impact and how we can generate ideas that stick and that companies want to fund and take them all the way out. When we ask, what’s the percentage of our revenue that is from new products, products that came and are born through those front-end innovations, then we can proudly show stakeholders the pipeline of products.”

“In the session, we share a little bit of the process and some learnings and experiences from my personal career and some advice that I picked up along the way,” says Ivosevic. “We’ll share in this session ways to help people to think, how do we get more of those ideas to go through the pipeline all the way to the end to create a profitable product.”

Thank you for taking us through that part of the innovation journey—taking it from start to finish during that sometimes fuzzy but fun front-end of innovation.

Solving the Puzzle of Scaling AI

The loose pieces of a metallic, circular puzzle, radiating outwards.

Balasundaram’s own session tackled the critical challenge of scaling AI within global corporations to enhance decision-making. Moving beyond isolated pilot projects, it explored such topics as overcoming “pilotitis,” adapting to the AI landscape, maturing AI initiatives, impact assessments, and human-AI collaboration.

At your session, attendees gained practical guidance on scaling AI initiatives, maximizing their impact on business outcomes, and fostering a data-driven culture. What other elements did your session bring to FEI?

“Number one, there are very few conferences out there that address the topic of innovation both from a conceptual side as well as an applied side,” says Balasundaram. “What you have put together here in terms of the speakers, the content, the topics, they address both sides of it. The way you parceled out the days, especially at this meeting with the human intelligence component as the first one, the AI component tomorrow, and then the collective on the third, it just makes a lot of sense given where many of these trends on AI are going and the augmented decision-making we’re all talking about. That’s really what’s been great to be here and hear other people go through the same journey.”

Moving Forward, Collectively

Speaking of that, your session dovetails nicely into the collective intelligence theme of the conference. This concept of AI and human insights, working together. How do you find that plays out in the insights and innovation communities?

“We will always be after deeper insights in a novel way,” he says. “We want to uncover insights that are different, which we can act on in a differentiable manner when we launch brands and to be able to impact decisions under a cloud of uncertainty. We must do that now with remarkably more information and content than we had, let’s say, five years ago and to do it in half the time we had that. How do you bring all of that in? You can’t do it just as a human alone because we have confirmation biases. We tend to look within our echo chambers.”

He adds, “I think AI helps us to do that, but AI alone isn’t going to be able to drive that. So it’s going to have to be what is that optimal combination of the help we need but also preserving our judgment, looking at data and information in new ways, uncovering insights in a fundamentally new way, and driving a decision and impact much faster than we could. I think that’s the puzzle that we’re all trying to solve.”

Exploring During the Journey

In both insights and innovation, there’s the idea of this exploration and journey and really making an impact with decision makers. This morning, we had the rogue mindset presentation, how do you think that mindset coincides with the insights and innovation communities?

Balasundaram relates, “Where the rogue mindset is critical, especially when it comes to AI and its application and insights, is it really challenges this notion many practitioners have about going to the risks of AI first, without also in balance talking about its merits. What I think the rogue mindset does is you’ve got to be able to be assertive about what are the benefits in something you do. Yes, it has risks, but it’s very important to drill down to what are the important things that AI is doing. For example, it is helping us manage an overwhelming amount of content that we would not be able to do otherwise. It is allowing us to think about things in new ways because it just isolates patterns that go beyond the way we think about the universe.”

“Sometimes AI goes to bad places, and we know that,” he adds. “But it does occasionally allow us to explore domains that we wouldn’t have done anyway. That’s where I think the rogue mindset is really helpful in a conference on innovation, that it puts you in a mindset that is assertive, that is solution oriented rather than kind of being behind the eight ball in terms of seeing what happens and then going into it.”