On this week’s episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about how to stop forcing motion and start building momentum, the value of design in the AI era, and the comeback of the physical store. Let’s get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what’s next. Each week, we’ll give you a front-row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Mile Zero’s Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let’s get started.
Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton
Midwest Venture Capital Momentum and the Greater Plains Summit
[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I’m your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me I have Robyn Bolton. Robyn, how are you?
[00:00:48] Robyn Bolton: I am doing great today. It is sunny and warm for once in Boston, so couldn’t be better. How are you doing?
[00:00:54] Brian Ardinger: I think it’s maybe the first time that Boston is warmer than Lincoln at this point. I think you said it was 80, and it’s 56 right here, so…
[00:01:00] Robyn Bolton: I was going to say, we’ve got one day a year where I have better weather, so I will take it.
[00:01:04] Brian Ardinger: Well, things are going well here in Nebraska. Last week was the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders weekend in Omaha, so if people are familiar with that, that’s when all the Warren Buffett fans come into town to spend money at Borsheim’s and Nebraska Furniture Mart and to learn what’s going on.
This year, there was a group, the gener8tor and NMotion Group, hosted a Greater Plains Summit where they brought in some investors and angel investors and want to be angel investors to tag along with what was going on at the Berkshire event. It was interesting because there were multiple different venture funds from around the Midwest that all came in.
I think it was probably the first time I’ve seen all of us in the same room, which was quite good, and we had a number of different discussions about what was going on in the Midwest when it comes to venture capital, and it’s nice to see more and more folks looking at the Heartland as a place that you can actually invest in new startups and new ideas and that.
[00:01:57] Robyn Bolton: That sounds like an awesome week because there is so much potential in the Midwest and the Heartland and the Plains. It always warms my heart when I hear about the venture community and the startups, and that it’s not all concentrated on the coasts.
Innovation Lessons from Massive Events and the IO Summit
So this week, school is wrapping up. The end of the semester’s coming, so I’ve been reading graduate theses. I read one, it was fascinating. It was a design solution to a crowd problem, but it’s about a festival in India. It happens every 12 years, and it draws between 250 million and 300 million people.
[00:02:39] Brian Ardinger: Wow….
[00:02:39] Robyn Bolton: To a single town over the course of several days. And I was like, that is bringing the population of America to a town in India and, like, having to create the city and the infrastructure and everything, a temporary city to house a country’s worth of people, and it just blew my mind
[00:03:02] Brian Ardinger: That puts Burning Man to shame, I think. And the 350 folks that we hosted in Lincoln the other week for the IO Summit, I guess we’re going to have to up our game, so.
[00:03:10] Robyn Bolton: I’m not sure you want to shoot for 350 million, and actually the festival that occurred last year was a big momentous one, only happens every 144 years, 600 million people. Yes, so I’m like, yay, 350 people for IO. That’s my speed. That’s my size crowd.
[00:03:30] Brian Ardinger: At least you had a chance to meet all of them.
[00:03:33] Robyn Bolton: Yes, yes, and have great conversations with them, and at no point did I feel like I was about to be crushed in a stampede, so … kudos to you.
Corporate Innovation: Stop Forcing Motion and Start Building Momentum
[00:03:42] Brian Ardinger: Well, let’s get into the meat of our podcast. As you know, each week we try to find three or four articles that we’ve come upon in the world of innovation to share with folks.
First one is a short blog post by Tendayi Viki. Tendayi’s with The Strategizer Group, and he’s got a short little blog post called Stop Forcing Motion, Start Building Momentum. What I liked about this, it was a very just short reminder about what we’re seeing in corporate innovation and a lot of places where all these transformation efforts, people spin them up, generate a lot of impressive movement you know, new structures are announced, new teams are announced, dashboards are filled up, and it’s a lot of motion.
And what Tendayi really talks about is the fact that motion is great, but what really, you’re trying to build is momentum. You know, motion peters out as soon as you stop pushing, but momentum keeps going. And so what are some of the things that you can do to kind of build momentum rather than just activities around it?
I think that’s a good important lesson to remember, especially as you’re spinning up new teams or new initiatives, that it’s more than just doing things. It’s like how do you create things that actually create momentum that allow the initiatives to continue to go forward and continue to build excitement, et cetera.
[00:04:49] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, this is a great reminder. You know one of the things that, that like you, that I, I see often and say often is people confusing activity for achievement. Tendayi’s first tip in this article to start where belief already exists is so spot on, because rarely is that where things actually start. It’s usually like, oh, you know, we need this much revenue, or we need to use this technology, and usually in those places there’s a ton of skepticism.
Building Credibility and Emotional Energy in Innovation Teams
Well, we should do this, but we’ve never done it before, and we’ll never do it well and blah, blah, blah. So instead, start where belief exists, where people already feel the need, but also feel like it’s possible. You get the quick wins, and then you do get the momentum. You get that motion and the velocity and the results and all of those good things that make innovation kind of self-perpetuating.
[00:05:40] Brian Ardinger: And just even a little bit of credibility creation goes a long way to, you know, stop the naysayers and/or give you a little bit more runway to actually continue to push that rock up the hill.
[00:05:50] Robyn Bolton: Yes. You got to believe you can push the rock.
[00:05:54] Brian Ardinger: I think the other point that he makes is how you design for emotional energy and doing things such that the emotions become contagious so that, again, it’s not just work, but there’s a meaning behind the work that you’re doing.
[00:06:07] Robyn Bolton: Yep, and we are humans after all, and humans are emotional, so don’t discount that. I know we’re business people too, but we remain humans even at work.
[00:06:18] Brian Ardinger: Most of the time, yes.
[00:06:19] Robyn Bolton: Most of the time, yes.
AI Startup Unit Economics and the Myth of Cheap Building
[00:06:21] Brian Ardinger: All right, the second article is from Ash Maurya. It’s actually a LinkedIn post that he had, and it’s titled There’s a Dangerous Myth Spreading Through the AI Startup World Right Now.
And Ash goes on to talk about this theme that we’re hearing that AI is so cheap that the old rules about unit economics don’t apply anymore. You know, it’s so cheap to spin up things. You can build without any cost compared to what it was in the past. But the flip side that a lot of people are not recognizing is the fact that this ability to move very fast and build fast is accelerating some broken models, in addition to the fact that people are not paying attention to unit economics.
You know, in the old days of SaaS, you could build your product, and you build it once, and then you can sell it over and over and over again with not a lot of additional variable costs. Well, with AI, you’re using that platform, the LLMs, and you’re paying token prices and things along those lines, and if you don’t build that into the model, every new user and every new engagement that you build onto that particular platform is sucking dollars into continuing to create that.
And not enough people are actually recognizing that or building that into their model from the beginning, and it’s just an important point to remember when you’re going through a new way of building with AI.
AI Prototypes Are Cheaper, But Businesses Still Need Customers
[00:07:30] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he makes such a great point that, as you said, everyone’s saying that like, “Oh, AI has made building so much cheaper,” and I think we just automatically fill in building a business so much cheaper, and it doesn’t.
It makes building a prototype, it makes building a product a lot cheaper and faster. But as he points out in his post, it doesn’t change whether or not customers will pay for it. Like, if it’s not a solution that has a problem, you can build it cheap. It doesn’t matter and it doesn’t change how much it costs to acquire a customer.
It doesn’t change whether margin survives at scale. So, there are aspects of building a business that doesn’t change. There’s one aspect of building and kind of testing for feasibility that does, and we are at risk if we confuse the two.
[00:08:28] Brian Ardinger: And I think that it brings up a lot of interesting things. Just again, we’re enamored with the fact that you can build something so quick that, you know, it’s very easy to get into the building phase and try things and kind of experiment.
But again, you can quickly run off the wrong road or whatever that analogy would be. But you can quickly fall in the wrong paths if you’re not at least cognizant of the fact that this is a different business model that you’re actually building.
[00:08:51] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, it kind of makes the idea of failing fast even that much more dangerous.
The Value of Design, Taste, and Meaning in the AI Era
[00:08:57] Brian Ardinger: All right, so the third article’s a Medium article on the UX Collective called Oh, But There’s One More Thing: The Value of Design in an AI Era. And this article talks about the importance of taste, the importance of design. You know, we talked about building, but there’s also an important part about remembering the fact that, again, you’re building something not to build something, but to create a solution for a problem you want to solve.
Customer has some particular need, and, you know, just because everybody can build something doesn’t mean that it has taste, doesn’t mean that it actually is going to solve the problem in the right way or is going to resonate in the way that the customer really wants. And so he talks about the incorporation of taste into what you’re building, and he talks about Steve Jobs and how Steve Jobs obviously is known for his taste in product design and product development.
And he goes and talks about how Jobs’ focus on taste and how he defined taste, and Steve Jobs talks about taste as coming down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and to bring those things into what you’re doing. So, it’s not just about, you know, making things look pretty or, from that perspective, it’s really about cultivating the immersion of high-quality work across multiple fields to create something that, you know, resonates with the customer.
Design-Driven Innovation and the Human Side of Product Meaning
[00:10:11] Robyn Bolton: Yeah. No, this was, it was a long article, but this is exactly the kind of article I love because it nerds out on pulling together strings from all sorts of different academic fields, history, things like that. And one of the articles or the thinkers that he highlighted in this to further illustrate what Jobs meant by taste, because I had heard the Steve Jobs quote about taste and thought it was, you know, just throwing shade at Microsoft, which does make ugly products.
But the author references this research into Italian design-driven companies like Alessi and Kartell, and that these companies did not succeed by conducting surveys of what users wanted. They succeeded by making bold proposals, by radically redefining what a product could mean for people, and they created markets that did not exist.
And so he calls this design-driven innovation the radical innovation of product meetings rather than just product features. And for me, this just crystallized it in, you know, going back to the last article we talked about, it’s so easy to build features now, and you can keep adding features. But building meaning is something that is, I would argue, impossible for AI to do, something that only humans can do, and that that really is the cornerstone of taste, is building that meaning for a product.
[00:11:34] Brian Ardinger: And ultimately, that may be the only moat that we have once the machines take over from the standpoint of if everybody can build the exact same thing or the exact same feature set, what makes it unique or different? It could be literally the taste the feeling, the essence around what you’re building or the relationships that you have with that customer rather than, again, physically solving the problem.
[00:11:55] Robyn Bolton: I’m looking at my iPhone right here, and there’s so many other companies creating a phone that looks like an iPhone, but I won’t buy those. I’m going to buy my phone from Apple and pay the ridiculous premium because it has meaning.
The Comeback of Physical Stores and Retail Experiences
[00:12:08] Brian Ardinger: All right, and the last article we want to talk about is a Harvard Business Review article, and it’s called The Comeback of the Physical Store and What It Means for Your Business.
I thought this was an interesting one to throw in there because, again, we talk a lot about tech, a lot about software, but we are seeing, and maybe it’s coming back to some of the things we’ve talked about already, the idea of tastes and experience and human relationships, this rise of the physical store is coming back.
Part of that is probably due to the economics where it’s getting harder and harder to attract customers on a website, and the cost of acquiring customers online is getting more and more difficult. So, there’s been a push and a movement more to creating real experiences, retail experiences, things along those lines that’s changing the dynamics.
And it allows you to then think about how, again, what type of business you’re building and realizing you don’t necessarily always have to be online. Maybe you can create something that is in the physical environment that changes the way the customers interact, build with you, and create value in the process.
[00:13:07] Robyn Bolton: Yeah. And what I loved about this, I mean, as much as he talks about the store as a services and experience destination, and, you know, we see that in flagship stores all over the place. He also talked about the very unsexy, very unglamorous, but very real value of store’s logistics hub. And, you know, I remember this from many, many, many years ago when I was working on the Walmart sales team, that that’s how Walmart would essentially kinda set up regions, is that they would have their superstores act as kind of mini warehouses that could then distribute to their regular stores, that could then distribute to, in certain markets, neighborhood markets, which were their grocery stores. And so, this idea of logistics hubs.
Physical Retail as a Logistics Hub and Customer Experience Platform
And so again, not as sexy as having a flagship store and all the whiz-bang design that goes into it, but very real business considerations, opportunities for cost savings, opportunities for getting the right product to the right people faster. So I was glad that this article called that out because that’s another argument for physical retail space.
[00:14:11] Brian Ardinger: Well, and it seems to be, again, people are maybe moving towards more of a retail environment again as this kind of hybrid, both logistics, a place to store the goods as well as sell the goods and showcase the goods. And again, going back to the roots of what retail really was and, you know, maybe reimagining or re-engaging with what retail was in the past.
[00:14:32] Robyn Bolton: You see all the black and white photos of, in the 1800s, you go into a general store and the storekeeper is behind a desk and you point out what you want and, and he gathers it for you. I’m like, I’m just waiting for that to, to be the next format in retail is you walk in and you point out what you want and the shopkeeper gathers for you.
[00:14:50] Brian Ardinger: Going back to the horse and buggy.
[00:14:51] Robyn Bolton: Horse and buggy.
[00:14:53] Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, that brings us to the end of another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. Thanks for coming out, and go out and innovate, and we’ll see you next time around.
[00:15:00] Robyn Bolton: See you next time.
[00:15:04] Brian Ardinger: That’s it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. Today’s episode was produced and engineered by Susan Stibal. If you want to learn more about our teams, our content, our services, check out insideoutside.io or if you want to connect with Robyn Bolton, go to MileZero.io, and until next time, go out and innovate.
Articles Referenced
- Stop Forcing Motion. Start Building Momentum – Tendayi Viki
- There’s a Dangerous Myth Spreading Through the AI Startup World Right Now – Ash Maurya
- Oh, But There’s One More Thing – The Value of Design in the AI Era – UX Collective
- The Comeback of the Physical Store—and What It Means for Your Business – HBR
