In Part 1 of our Innovation Roundtable series, the participants explored the possibilities of transformational innovation. Here, 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.
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 2: Attaining Zero to N Innovation
Seth Adler: We’ve all had many conversations around 0 to N. Let’s break that down. I think everybody at the table, 0 to 1, sure. But 1 to N is where the rubber meets the road. What might you share in that area?
Harsh Wardhan: When you think about 0 to 1, it’s the MVP. You are trying to disrupt the market. You’re trying to do something new, and that’s where everybody’s head goes to, because that’s exciting. But how do you take it from 1 to N, which is sustainable innovation? How do you sustain it? You’re beyond the crisis. You have built something. How do you sustain it? How do you keep doing it? That’s where most of the challenges lie, such as when Prapti spoke about culture and structures. How do you sustain that?
I’ll give an example of a company I worked for, Ford Motor Company. In the 2020 time frame, when Tesla was still a kid, I would say nobody cared about Tesla. Let’s say 2019. I joined the company and I was like, wow, this is an amazing vehicle. Why don’t you talk about it? I was right in the heart of the automotive scene in Detroit. And Ford was like, ha, they are kids. In 2020, the Tesla cyber truck is launched. What happened? That was the crisis for Ford (the best-selling truck in the world is the Ford F-150). They saw a threat in the cyber truck. That’s when they started developing more sustainable innovation in the context of trucks. And so now you have the Ford Lightning truck. You have so many trucks being introduced with all new technology that we see now.
Cherie Leonard: That got me thinking about the importance of not only the way that we develop and scale internally, but the critical component of culture and context of what’s happening around us. It actually took me back to music streaming. Think about Napster. You could argue that they were one of the first. It gained some momentum and then failed pretty quickly. I would argue it never got to the end. But then you have something coming along a couple years later, like Spotify. What were those externalities that helped drive or help propel or help scale it to what it is today from a subscription perspective? Was it the smartphone, the fact that you needed that sort of device in order to create the demand or the occasions for streaming? Was it something else about the bandwidth and the technology? Was Napster ahead of its time? It got me thinking a little bit more about the externalities as well.
Tammy Butterworth: I think the reason I was nodding, it was reminding me of a previous experience I’ve had. I think a minimum viable product is great. I had the experience of launching one where the R&D team knew that, the marketing team knew that, but the sales team and the route to market was quite traditional. And so we take a non-perfect product, we put it into market and it quickly gets taken out. And there’s no more permission to be there. I think you need to have that approach holistically across an organization or it turns into a disaster that nobody wants to talk about.
Michele Sandoval: That really struck a chord with me. With Gallo, sales are our bread and butter. We are always trying to find ways to test and learn. Once you’ve burned that bridge, it is so hard to go back and go to a retailer and say, well I know we introduced this brand or we introduced this new line extension. It failed, but we’re going to introduce it in a different brand in a different way with a different proposition. We think now it’s going to succeed. And they’re like, yeah, right. Even getting that internal buy-in from your own sales organization is challenging. Once it’s failed, you lose that chance. You must be so sure. We are trying to find new ways to be able to get that learning in the hands of our customers. We call it sips to lips. Get that learning in the hands of our consumers, and be able to learn and iterate without the fear of losing that opportunity long term.
Leslie Shannon: History is littered with examples of companies that innovated, had a great idea a little too soon. Xerox with the mouse, Nokia phones. And even the iPhone, it wasn’t the first iPhone. It wasn’t the second iPhone. The one that really exploded and took down networks was the iPhone 3. Because that was the first one that had 3G and the App Store, the first two didn’t. That was the iPhone 3, not the one in 2009, not the first one in 2007. Apple stuck with it. It was the same thing at Nokia on the mobile phone side as Ford with the Tesla. It’s a terrible telephone, which it was, but Apple had changed the paradigm to the thing in your pocket going from a phone to being a computer. And that’s what we didn’t see.
Prapti Jha: If I may just add to that point. Knowing what the future might look like is really important when it comes to 0 to 1 and 1 to N. In my talk yesterday at FEI, I was saying zero to N as a company mindset. We must start thinking that way because of the place that we are in right now. Future thinking is one way that you plan for scenarios and do all those exercises.
But once you start seeing those scenarios, signals of change around you from social, technological, political, all these perspectives, rather than just tech, then you are more ready and prepared for what the future might look like. And then you’re working towards that. To your point, iPhones at first did they fail? Still, they stuck with it because they saw the future would change. It won’t be the Blackberries in the know or Nokia. Having that confidence is from that kind of thinking and their methods and frameworks to do that and bring that into the organization.
Adler: Milan, where do you come in here? Prapti is kind of trying to take the one out and just go zero to N.
Milan Ivosevic: I would like to build on that because that resonates with me. I don’t think we can separate it, because actually zero to one defines where you are going. Are you running left or right? If you miss that, it doesn’t matter what you do along the way. Your one to N could be a very wrong direction. And I’ll just add that the scale element here is very key. What is good business for a $10 billion company is very different than a $100 million company. That’s where that 1 to N and investment, if you move wrong, it gets magnified. And sometimes many companies we are mentioning here, they go way back, go too far on that. So the 0 to 1 scale will define where you’re aiming. And if you’re in the right direction, 1 to N actually magnifies that.
Jha: To clarify, I just said having that compass is important for where you are going, for both kinds of innovations.
Adler: Nevada, where does your company fit in here in the zero to N continuum?
Nevada Sanchez: It’s been an incredible story in that we did something very disruptive to the industry, bringing very low cost, very powerful imaging to the medical world. Unfortunately, it was also probably the most slow moving industry you could possibly bring an innovation into. And so navigating that, that sustainable aspect, how do we survive this long struggle to enact this change? And that industry has been an incredible topic of focus for us.
And I think it was key to being obscenely tuned in to what are the barriers in place? Is it image quality? Let’s invest in that. Is it enterprise software? Let’s invest in that. So that you’re prepared to address all of these things that are going to stand in your way. Perseverance is incredibly important here. You have to be really attentive, strategic and reactive to those signals that you’re getting, when you talk to the customers. Why are you not adopting this? What’s in your way? And so you really have to be tuned into that, react to it quickly, make sure that strategic input is going into all of your strategies as a company.
Lisa Costello: I would say a lot of this work has to be done at the same time. As you’re building your MVP, you also have to be doing the work of making sure that it’s ready for the market or ready for your internal organization to be ready to adopt. And if you haven’t done that work at the same time, then you can end up forcing something through that just doesn’t feel good. Then you did the work before it was ready.
Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for more posts featuring All Things Innovation’s roundtable discussion on transformational innovation.
