Innovating Out Loud

We take a lot for granted in innovation. Chief among them: that questions are where it all starts. So this episode, Larry Robertson and I decided to poke at our own assumption and see if it held up. Larry’s an innovation advisor and the author of Great Question , a book he built by talking to more than 140 people — neuroscientists, teachers, artists, CEOs. What he found is that we’re a questioning...

Northern Wisconsin, 1905. A windstorm flattened whole stands of sugar maple across the Menominee reservation — millions of board feet on the ground, already starting to rot. The Menominee wanted to salvage the fallen timber and mill it themselves. The federal authority refused. Downed Indian timber, sold at volume, would depress the price of white-owned timber. Better the trees rot, he decided, th...

Something you believe in is stuck. You can probably picture it without trying. Six, twelve, eighteen months in and still “almost there.” The room nods and nothing moves after. The champion’s gone quiet. You ask what went wrong and you get a shrug and four theories, none of which tell you what to do differently. This week on IOL, we're releasing the latest version of Innovation Coach to help you ge...

Three days short of 33 years at 3M, Jayshree Seth now leads the effort to put generative AI use-cases to work in R&D — which puts her between the hype and the people who have to live with it. Her message is bracing and oddly reassuring at once: AI can accelerate every step of the climb from data to wisdom, but it can't make the climb for you. Skip the human work and you don't reach the answer fast...

It’s a warm evening in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, and you’ve brought a glass of wine out to the back deck the way you have for years. The grass, the fence, the slow blue dark coming down. And underneath all of it, something new. A hum. The kind you feel in your chest. A low, constant drone, loud enough to carry over a television and conversations around the fire pit. Some nights you give up on the...

Between two stories sits one idea: technology is never neutral. It takes on the character of whoever designs it, builds it, and runs it. The tower and the city are built with the same stone. What changes is who decided and who participated. Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft This piece connects directly to four frameworks from the book: * Innovating With Everyone — Nehem...

In December 2020, I was one year into my time at Microsoft and four months into intentional discovery for my mission, creating the Data Center of the Future. Listen to the full episode to hear behind the scenes stories of what is possibly THE most important practice of innovation as a discipline. How AI, as it's packaged today, erodes it. And why you should make the space for it no matter how hard...

Last week I signed up for an expedition to Antarctica. I get terrible seasickness. I hate small planes. Antarctica has never appeared on any version of my bucket list. I signed up anyway. ---- Innovation culture talks constantly about the courage to change . It almost never talks about the voice that tells you not to. Over nineteen weeks, this series has mapped a lot of terrain: systems, tools, co...

We’ve all given the presentation that flopped. The content was right. We knew the material. We rehearsed. And we walked out of the room knowing — somehow — that it didn’t land. The post-mortem is honest. Nothing was wrong with the vision. The argument was sound. The slides were clean. The case was the right one to make. And still... Listen to the full piece on Substack or Apple Podcasts. And then...

Last week on Innovating Out Loud , we sat down with Leo Chan — keynote speaker, corporate trainer, and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® facilitator — to take play seriously as a tool for innovation. Leo treats creativity as a muscle that atrophies without use, and play as the discipline that keeps it strong. We worked through what LEGO Serious Play actually does (it lets people think with their hands instead o...

Two weeks ago I shared Innovation Coach — a tool that runs a question through multiple expert lenses and reframes the problem before answering it. 150 people tried it! And the feedback was clear: the reframe was something no general-purpose LLM produced. But Gemini and others gave more actionable results. Fair. CANOPY is the response. This is what Regenerous Labs is here to do — give experts the i...

Behavior is the Barrier: The Time for the Regenerative Data Center of the Future is Now For six years I’ve been inside the data center meets community problem space. I’ve had a technical and commercial blueprint in hand since my team delivered it internally at Microsoft in 2023. The design is more desirable for communities, as technically feasible as what’s currently being built, and more economic...

Last week I kept IOL brief because I was building. I am building. Every day. Experimenting. Running things, seeing what they surface, learning from what they miss. Most of it stays inside the Lab. This week, I’m letting some of it out. What I’m sharing today isn’t a commercial product. It’s one of my daily experiments. Lightweight, live, and instructive whether it works or not. In this case, it’s...

It’s Easter Sunday and I’m building things. Not egg baskets — products, prototypes, the kind of work where the inspiration and energy don’t pause politely for holidays. What I feel is momentum — the particular forward motion that comes when you’ve been circling an idea long enough and something finally clicks into place. What to Read, Watch, and Listen to This Week 🎧 Listen: Lenny’s Podcast — Ant...

Most organizations are sitting on far more value than they realize—not because it’s exotic, but because it’s submerged beneath the waterline of conventional measurement. In this Innovating Out Loud session, Regenerous Labs partners JoAnn Garbin and Taryn Kutches hosted Daniel Aronson, founder of Valutus , for a conversation about the growing gap between the value organizations create and the value...

Why these 3 Ds of innovation matter more now, not less. I built four profitable businesses in the first 25 years of my career. I’m on track to build four THIS YEAR with the help of two things I never had before. ---- Thank you for reading and listening. Don’t forget to register for our live monthly recording of Innovating out Loud . Our next guest is….TBD! But we’re aligning calendars with a few i...

For eleven weeks now, I’ve been exploring ideas in this space — what dormancy makes possible, why factories fail at ecosystem-shaped problems, how mutualism works, what “enough” actually means. Each week, I’ve tried to say it ugly and see what emerges. But I’ve never told you why. This week, I’m sharing my founder story. It’s the origin of every thread we’ve been pulling. If you’ve been reading al...

ICYMI Last month, Juliana Tioanda, a senior leader in Xbox, joined Taryn and me for an hour of sharing and exploring how individuals and teams can drive innovation amid constant disruption by focusing on mindsets, “the right kind of” introspection, and what they can personally control. What’s next Our next Innovating Out Loud session will focus on uncovering the submerged value of your initiatives...

Ecology has a near-ironclad law called competitive exclusion: two species occupying the same niche in the same environment cannot coexist indefinitely. One outcompetes the other — not because it’s better, but because even tiny adaptive advantages compound over time. The losing species doesn’t always die. More often, it shifts . Example: way back in the day, wolves and coyotes were competing for th...

What would innovation look like if we Started With What—if present-tense introspection were treated as essential infrastructure rather than optional self-improvement? Not moments of silence and meditation at the start of design charrettes but intentional moments of noticing in real time. And could we initiate the shift to this practice (and regenerative innovation) by Starting with Who—intentional...

In Yellowstone, researchers found ravens present at wolf activity 99.7% of the time in winter—not just at kill sites, but while wolves traveled, rested, and hunted. Why? Neither needs the other to survive—but together, they’re dramatically more successful. Ravens lead wolves to food sources they would otherwise miss. Wolves tear open what ravens never could. Together they create a surplus that cas...

Like most of us, I’m trying to wrap my head around what is happening in Minneapolis. There are so many thoughts I have that add nothing constructive to the conversation. But the reality in Minneapolis is the thing I’ve been trying to make sense of all week—writing about anything else would have been disingenuous. So I looked for a question that I could try to answer that builds on what my team and...

Last week I asked: What if “enough” is what makes our systems playable? On our latest episode of the IOL webcast, Taryn and I got to explore that question with someone who’s been designing more than “enough” into physical systems for years. Sean Quinn is the Director of Regenerative Design at HOK, one of the world’s largest architecture and design firms. He was one of the people who first introduc...

Consider two paintings by Picasso. The first: Science and Charity , painted when he was fifteen. A doctor takes a sick woman’s pulse. A nun holds a child. The scene is realistic, technically masterful, emotionally clear. You know immediately what you’re seeing and what to feel. The second: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , painted ten years later. Five figures, fractured into geometric planes. Faces tha...

One of the more famous quotes attributed to Einstein (which ironically is just enough of what he said, but are not actually his words) is “make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” The aphorism was derived from Einstein’s work trying to conceive of an irreducibly simple theory of everything. I’m not afraid to admit my aim is more modest: to design simple enough systems to enable “8 bill...