Inside Outside Innovation

Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs and Author of Escaping the Build Trap: How effective product management creates value. She believes that as companies scale, they lose track of what makes them successful and they just “ship.” Companies forget to bring products back to the overall strategy and talk with their customers. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Melissa ab...

Vivek Bedi has worked in both corporate and startup innovation. His experiences range from positions at Goldman Sachs, to running his own company. Now at Northwestern Mutual, Vivek is the Head of Consumer Experience, Digital Products, working in both New York and Milwaukee. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Vivek about Northwestern Mutual's digital transformation. Vivek...

Ajay Rajani is an investor, entrepreneur, and author of Navigating the shift to a ‘portfolio career’ - How we should think about our professional identities — when they’re designed to change. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, and Ajay talk about building and highlighting a portfolio career. After leading Nexxt, a digital remote accelerator that helps people take ideas and turn the...

Michael Frankel is the Managing Director of Deloitte’s New-venture Accelerator, a strategy and operations team for new business models. He believes people need to disrupt themselves continually or they will fall behind.  Emergence of the Hybrid  The broader trend of the journey from human to tech is not happening instantly. Things that require judgment and strategy, need a hybrid solution. A lot o...

Simone Ahuja, Author of Disrupt-It-Yourself: Eight Ways to Hack a Better Business---Before the Competition Does, researches barriers that are preventing large companies from innovating internally. Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation talks with Simone about these innovation barriers and what managers and leaders can do to support innovators.  Highlights from the discussion: Why is...

Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics, is an expert on Artificial Intelligence. In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation, talks with Jana about the evolution, promises, and risks of Artificial Intelligence. Jana will be speaking at the E.N. Thompson Forum, in Lincoln, NE, on Feb 26, 2019.  Highlights from the discussion: - Jana trained as a mathematician and has worked at or...

Ted Schilowitz serves as Paramount Pictures' Futurist, as well as an advisor to the University of Nebraska’s Johnny Carson School of Emerging Media Arts. He sees himself as an explorer, with an eye toward storytelling and creativity. His modern lab rat approach, allows him to experiment with all types of technology and determine what makes it valuable for the future. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside...

If you don’t like disruption, you are going to HATE irrelevance.  Chris Olsen of Drive Capital talks about investing in world-class companies located in the Midwest. Drive Capital, a venture firm based in Columbus, OH, developed a $550 million fund with this aim. Chris believes the Midwest will see more billion-dollar companies in the next five years, and based on GDP, the Midwest is the 4th large...

Why do some people have innovative, creative ideas that change the game for everyone and challenge the way life is, and others don’t? Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside talks with Arjuna Ardagh about how brilliance and innovation can become more of a predictable outcome and less of an accident. They discuss his new book, Radical Brilliance - The Anatomy of How and Why People Have Original L...

Sean Moffitt is Managing Director of WikiBrands and Author of WikiBrands: How to Reinvent Your Business in a Customer Connected Marketplace. He focuses on helping people develop a transformational arsenal, including skills in culture and talent, innovation and future proofing, technology and digital, and leadership/pivoting business models. Highlights of Sean's conversation with Brian Ardinger, In...

Dr. Victoria Gerstman is the Assistant Director at Canopy Insight, a cultural insight and innovation consultancy. She helps companies and brands understand the cultural significance of different phenomena. Using semiotics, a method to interpret signs and symbols of culture which brands operate in, Victoria helps companies learn what’s important to people.  Canopy Insight works with many large bran...

Paul Jarrett is co-founder/CEO of Bulu and a former Inside Outside podcast co-host. Bulu creates private label subscription box programs for large companies like Disney, GNC, Lululemon, and Crayola. In this episode, Brian Ardinger and Paul discuss new trends in big brand marketing, including getting in front of specific customer segments in new ways. Paul believes that in this changing marketplace...

Creating environments where innovation can thrive Aaron Proietti is author of the new book, Today’s Innovator. He’s spent 17 years working in the innovation space, including leading initiatives at Transamerica and Capital One. Aaron believes everyone wants innovation to happen, but the traits that make the company successful are the very things that are standing in the way of innovation.  Today’s...

Changing everything while disrupting nothing John Buhl spent the last 13 years at Vanguard, innovating at all levels. He loved applying Lean Startup principles at scale and discovering what elements needed to change. Unfortunately, he hit many brick walls and found friction to make changes throughout the organization. The system of annual funding, with specific deliverables, was well entrenched. J...

Barry O’Reilly is the Author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results and Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. He and Brian Ardinger discuss creating a culture of experimentation in enterprises and seeing everything as an assumption.  Barry came to the U.S. originally from Ireland on a student visa and worked at City Search “putting peop...

Innovation is No Longer Optional Doug Hall has been in the innovation space for more than 30 years. His new book, Driving Eureka!, is about finding, filtering and fast-tracking to market and includes an update on what is continuously being learned about creating, communicating, and commercializing ideas. In 1986, Doug started Eureka Ranch, an early "accelerator" program focused on commercializing...

Amy Radin is the author of The Change Maker's Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company. She was previously a Senior Executive at American Express, Citi Group, and eTrade. Amy's experience includes leading the digital transformation of Citi Group’s credit card business ($5b bottom line). Today, Amy enjoys being on the outside of big companies and startups, to help connect the...

There’s no way to innovate if you only stay in your court Xavi Cortadellas is the Head of Innovation and Design at Gatorade. He focuses on innovating in the newest spaces, like tech and services, rather than incremental innovation. Gatorade invented sports drinks 50 years ago and now has an 80% market share. With little room to expand, they actively look for new spaces to grow. Because Gatorade is...

Jeff Rohrs is the CMO of Yext and Author of Audience: Marketing in the age of subscribers, fans and followers, and The Everywhere Brand ebook. He’s also a former VP at Salesforce and ExactTarget. In this episode, Brian Ardinger and Jeff talk about managing content and brands across the web and how hard it is to put perfect information into consumer’s hands everywhere. Yext uses a digital knowledge...

Melissa Steach is an ergonomic specialist with Herman Miller. She works to educate various communities about ergonomics in the workplace while valuing and focusing on the importance of the human for design innovation. Brian Ardinger and Melissa take a look at innovation from a design perspective and how that can impact the workplace and home environments. The built environment helps human growth,...

After years of working in startups, Sean Johnson and his team began getting approached by enterprises. These companies needed help moving on ideas, accessing specialists and understanding how to be iterative. Today, Sean's company Digital Intent works with venture-backed startups and Fortune 1000 companies wanting to be tech-enabled businesses. He is also a general partner at Founder Equity. Brian...

In this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger talks with Christopher Bailey and Kim Bullock with ExxonMobil. They discuss successes and challenges of innovating in a large corporation. Christopher and Kim will also be speaking at the Back End of Innovation Conference in Phoenix, AZ on Oct 17-19, 2018. Key strategies and lessons they learned include: - Create space for idea cr...

In this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger has a great conversation with Nicole Rufuku, author of Hiring for the Innovation Economy: Three steps to improve performance and diversity. They discuss how to hire for innovation in a world that’s changing.  In her book, Nicole gives teams a set of innovation principals to use in the hiring process. They are: 1. Collaboration  2....

Jeremy Lockhorn is VP, Experience Strategy, Mobile + Emerging Technology at SapientRazorfish and has served a wide variety of roles during his 20-year tenure. The common thread is on a focus of what’s next. In this podcast, Jeremy and Brian Ardinger discuss technology changes over the past 10 years and the implications for the future. They know each other from their days in the digital signage spa...

In this episode, Brian Ardinger talks with Doug Branson about his new book The Future of Tech is Women: How to Achieve Gender Diversity.  Brian and Doug start the conversation by looking at trends in the market. Doug outlines the history of women in senior corporate positions. Of the 70 women that have been CEOs of publicly held companies, 70% have MBAs. Of the 27 women that have held exec positio...