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
Exploring Transformational Innovation
Seth Adler: Here we go again. We have many of the same faces from last year’s roundtable that we did at FEI 2023. This is FEI 2024, and we’ve added some new voices and faces, so thank you for doing this, all of you. So, transformational innovation, we talked about it last year. We’re going to kind of attack this again, because we need to back up and ask the question, is this even possible? Milan, you have the microphone in your hand, so we will ask you first, is it even possible? And if so, how?
Milan Ivosevic: If it’s not, I’m completely lost. It’s an interesting topic that I touched on in my FEI session, and how it’s possible. I believe it is. There are many examples in the industry that have happened throughout history, so it’s possible. Is it more difficult these days? Can we really push for a transformational level, that’s the question right now. We have new tools. Is it AI? Is it still the human element? What is it? But it’s been possible up to now, and I hope it will remain in the future.
Adler: Michele, you’re coming from a different type of organization. How is transformational innovation possible?
Michele Sandoval: Absolutely. It’s how you think about transformational. You can take an existing business and reinvent it and transform it and how you navigate that business, or you can truly come up with something that’s new, innovative and new to the world. But I think both are considered transformational if they significantly change how you work and what you do.
Tammy Butterworth: Yes, it’s possible and much needed. I think what I learned from the panel that we started FEI with is the importance of collaboration. We’re not going to get to it on our own. It has to be across the business and maybe across businesses. What I’m seeing more and more is to make that big difference and reach true transformation. You need lots of input and lots of people working together.
Cherie Leonard: Yes, transformation innovation is possible. I’d actually love to build on something just said around the fact that collaboration is key and it’s like one plus one equals three or exponentially in my mind. But, thinking about this question, I was trying to think about an analogy. Is it push and pull? What is it? I turned to Gen AI to see what kind of analogy they would use. And I think it was interesting. It was a little bit about the city and the outskirts. And the city is the core, the heart and soul, the business, the commercial, the P&L, giving lending resources to the outskirts, which really drives the creativity, the provocative thinking, the longer-term vision, and how those two have to work symbiotically together.
Adler: AI is this tool that we can use to help innovators and maybe go leaps and bounds forward with. This is the leapfrog type situation. Harsh, what would you add here about AI as a tool for transformational innovation?
Harsh Wardhan: I think, specific to AI, it is. The way that people are thinking about AI is that it’s going to change the world, and that’s where our head goes to. But we should be thinking about how it supercharges our today and how it supercharges our work, and that’s how it’s going to help with transformational innovation. Because again, with transformational innovation, people are thinking it’s like a light bulb moment. It’s disruptive, it changes. But there’s a lot of work that goes behind that. And it’s months of work, if not years. For those who have a good research background, you know how much research you are doing to get to that transformational element. Just an example, using AI, you can cut short that time. That’s how you are supercharging innovation, transformational innovation with AI.
Leslie Shannon: I want to throw a little wrench into the concept of transformational innovation. In my experience, it takes a crisis, it takes some kind of existential threat before people go, this is serious. Okay, now we really need to do it. I just wanted to get that out there, that charming, optimistic take. But on the AI side, it’s important to understand that all AI is not the same. We’ve got machine learning, which is using structured data, and that has been around forever. It’s all the information in your databases, and it’s things that we’ve been using. In my industry, telecommunications, we’ve been using that for the basis of automation. Decisions can be made in millisecond speeds, and machines can figure out what to do next based on the information that’s coming from the structured data. That is unchanged, and that is carrying on.
Generative AI, on the other hand, is looking at unstructured data. It’s looking at the information that you have in your user manuals, in your PowerPoints, in your marketing information, coming from the corporate point of view. It takes seconds, not milliseconds. And so that means that it’s not fast enough for machines. The output of generative AI is specifically designed to be looked at by a human. So generative AI assumes a human in the mix to first ask the question and then to interpret the answer. Yes, it’s a tool. I think what you were saying is exactly right about the role. It doesn’t do everything, but it speeds things up. You still have to have a good question in and you still have to have good interpretation of what comes out.
Adler: Obviously all AI is not created equal, and we can use it differently and there are different iterations.
Prapti Jha: Great points. I think what we’re all referring to is when we talk about transformational innovation in a corporate setting, two things that become super crucial is what are the structures in that corporate setting, because that inhibits any kind of transformation or any kind of disruption to happen.
The second is the culture. I know it’s something we all talk about. It’s hard to change, but that’s also connected to Leslie’s point that it needs a crisis because when that crisis happens, you’re open to changing those structures that you’re comfortable with and also changing the culture when it comes to AI and those decisions around structures and culture.
Humans will have to take the initiative, the leadership and the vision. AI can help you with what those structures might look like. There’s the tool aspect of it. I believe that and also because I work in this human centered innovation world so much, asking the right questions that we talked about and the aspect of empathy would be something that humans would have to bring into the equation and that with help from AI can do that.
Lisa Costello: I used to have a boss that used to say, never waste a good crisis. He was a military guy and I’ve always kind of taken that to heart. On the transformational AI and innovation front, I would add that a lot of times we think we have to do this alone in our own silo as a corporation. What AI is allowing us to do to achieve that transformational innovation is to go outside of our organization, be able to collect a lot more data that we haven’t had access to before. We get a lot more of that external innovation that we can bring in. That’s the role that venture capital plays in the area that I work in. We can take advantage of a lot more startups and resources from outside in.
Adler: Nevada, you really exist because you’re part of an ecosystem, and that external innovation. Can you describe the way that you’re making transformational innovation happen through a network of partners?
Nevada Sanchez: This is actually a big focus for our company right now, and we’ve found tremendous success in being able to see an explosion of innovative applications by engaging with external parties, startups, researchers that saw what we had built, and realized they could use that to build something even more innovative and interesting. I never would have thought about building a brain implant, an ultrasound machine, but someone’s doing that right now, we are working with them to do that. It’s been pretty incredible what it’s done to the team and the organization, giving people the opportunity to see all these perspectives, new markets, new applications. It’s very motivating. It has carry-on effects beyond just the partnership itself. I think it’s improving the innovation spirit within the organization as well.
Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for more posts featuring All Things Innovation’s roundtable discussion on transformational innovation.
