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 Miles Zero's Robyn Bolton. As we discussed, the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

Robyn’s book, Unlocking Innovation, is available on Kindle for $.99 on September 18, 2025. Grab your copy today!

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm Brian Ardinger, and today we have our co-host, Robyn Bolton, back. Welcome Robyn.

[00:00:35] Robyn Bolton: Glad to be back.

[00:00:37] Brian Ardinger: We are excited to be back talking about innovation. We were ranked one of the top 15 corporate innovation podcasts out there, so I'm excited to continue this journey and helping our audience understand this world of innovation for this new format that we've been trying. Robyn came on as a co-host. Anything new going on in your world?

[00:00:54] Robyn Bolton: I think you're being very humble. You weren't just kind of in the top 15 podcasts by a hair. You were...

[00:01:01] Brian Ardinger: I think we were four.

[00:01:02] Robyn Bolton: You were up there.

[00:01:03] Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It was a sweet spot. It was nice to be recognized.

[00:01:07] Robyn Bolton: Well, and they nailed it.

[00:01:09] Brian Ardinger: One of the articles that I wanted to talk about today, and actually was a newsletter of a friend of mine, and people who've listened to podcasts or know of innovation, might know of David Bland.

He's the author of Testing Business Ideas, among other things. In his most recent newsletter. He had a little article talking about why most execs regret the projects they didn't cut. The gist of the article was talking about how every executive has a few projects that haunt them, and it's usually the ones that drag on too long and consume too much capital.

And we always hear about the winner, so to speak, and or not betting on the winner, but the idea of a portfolio of things that you've got within your corporate environment of things that you should cut or look at. Could it be a big win if we got rid of this thing? How do you prevent that burning capital on projects that you don't want or don't warrant additional investment and time, energy, and money?

I'd love to get your thoughts on what you've seen in the corporate environment and this idea of cutting your bets off or making sure that you don't continue bets down the wrong line.

[00:02:07] Robyn Bolton: Sadly, I see it all the time. You know, we call them zombie projects. They're the living dead and sadly kind of the people that are staffed on them. Eventually figure it out. And I feel like they become zombies too. Zombie projects eat their brain.

The thing is, they are consuming really valuable resources. They're taking up the time of really smart people. They're taking up the funding that could be used to go to another great idea that has better potential.

I think back to my early days in P & G's kind of new business development group, in just one single BU, and I think there were probably, at one time, eight different projects, all new brands that were in different phases of development, and ultimately only Swiffer launched nationally and survived for several years.

There was another one called Dryel that launched but didn't quite survive the first several years, and then a whole bunch that just petered out, like you kind of had to wait for the next CEO to come in and do the culling that every CEO does. But in the meantime, it was years of people working really hard on things they cared about that just were never going to work. It was heartbreaking.

[00:03:26] Brian Ardinger: It's interesting because I think about why does this happen? Because if you're a startup and you're going down the wrong path, you probably don't hear about it because you just kind of run out of runway and it goes away. Where the challenge in a corporate environment is typically you do have some capital that can continue to be funneled in different ways down projects that may or may not be deserving of it.

And so, I think one of the traps that a lot of corporates fall into is this, okay, we've sunk costs into it. Let's just keep going with it. We know the expectations. It's not going to be a big win or whatever, but it's not going to be a loser if we get rid of it and branded as a loser, or a minimal amount of capital that maybe it is bringing in, the revenue it is bringing in. It's like, well, why should we get rid of it? It's bringing some revenue versus thinking about it from the standpoint of what if we got rid of that $30-50 million investment that we're making every year and reallocated that into newer things that could have more explosive growth or more opportunities.

[00:04:17] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I think you're spot on. And it's funny that no amount of mentioning, naming, whatever the sunk cost fallacy will deter people because there's always the rationalization and this feeling like in order to be successful, I need to launch a successful thing into the market. And years ago I was working with a big pharmacy chain, and to try to head it off, we actually created a enterprise wide award for the biggest hill.

It comes down to what we're rewarded for, right? And if you have an award for killing a project to free up the most resources, and of course, embedded in this reward was what were your learnings? What are the resources getting used for? How are they getting funneled back into innovation? It was amazing that first year, how many zombies got put out of their misery.

[00:05:10] Brian Ardinger: And I think it's one of those fundamental things that, again, the momentum, it's very easy in a corporate environment to continue because again, most corporate environments are about executing. And so the momentum of execution continues to push you down a path when maybe your customers aren't asking for the thing that you're doing, or the market's switched or changed, or competitors have come in, and it's no longer the path.

But to change that, there's a cultural thing that I think has to be at least thought about. It's not just trying to find the big wins from an innovation perspective. If you're in corporate innovation, you should also be thinking about what can we cut or what can we do to allocate our resources appropriately and not just go down some particular path because it's what we've been told to do.

[00:05:51] Robyn Bolton: A hundred percent.

[00:05:53] Brian Ardinger: The second article was actually came from your newsletter. The newsletter talked about what chickens and innovation teams have in common.

[00:06:01] Robyn Bolton: Unexpected reading, but the article starts off with a story of a study that was conducted out of Purdue University decades ago where animal geneticist wanted to see if he could create super chickens, super layers of eggs.

He put nine chickens that were the top performers in terms of laying eggs into one coop, and the very average performers in terms of egg laying in another coop within a relatively short period of time. The super coop, six of the chickens were dead and the remaining three had been pecked bare and were just dolls of their former selves.

Meanwhile, over in the average coop, they were producing more than they ever had before, and what struck me is there's a TED talk about this talking generally about how companies tend to subscribe to this, bring in all the stars, and then this is what happens. But it also made me think of innovation teams and how so often companies, when they're starting up an innovation effort, they put their high potential employees, they're high performers on it.

And the reality is, is those people are high performers. In the environment of the regular core business, they are awesome at executing the core, understanding its processes, working with the certainty that it offers. They're getting picked up and plunked into an environment that's completely different than where they've been successful and they don't end up dead, but they do end up stressed beyond belief.

[00:07:39] Brian Ardinger: One of the things that we see at Nelnet, and one of the things that we've done to find those folks that are innovation curious or, or restless, and they're not always the highest performers. They're the folks that, again, have maybe a different take on it or are within their core business, they're just open to looking at new ideas.

And so, we created a, a group called the Innovation Advocates, where we meet on a weekly basis, just talk about what's going on across the different business units and get different insights, different topics on what's happening. And what we found is not only is it the collaboration across the business units happening greater, but the insights that we're getting have been phenomenal.

And the ability for us to have them be able to contribute to the situations and that conversations has really leveled up our culture of innovation at Nelnet.

[00:08:24] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I love it because the people that you're bringing together as advocates are probably the people who are always asking questions. Yeah. And wondering, you know, why are we doing it this way? Or coming up with ideas for how to improve things. And so there's just a natural curiosity and sense of like, we can do better. Yeah. Let's try.

[00:08:42] Brian Ardinger: We set up the group specifically around the fact that you don't have to be director-level or above. Yeah. You literally can raise your hand and say, hey, I'm interested in innovation. I think I can add something to this. And I raise my hand and say; I will be an eyes and ears in my group to help people advocate for innovation.

And we found that because of the democratization of it, we've gotten a lot of different types of people that have been involved in that and have gotten different output because of that.

[00:09:07] Robyn Bolton: I bet those people feel so much more just empowered in their regular day-to-day jobs. They feel so much more energized and loyalty to Nelnet, and there's just the positive ripple effects for them and for everyone else. It's just got to be off the charts.

[00:09:25] Brian Ardinger: When you set the stage of do you want to start your most productive projects with productive hens or the most mediocre ones, it's very thought-provoking. So, thanks for throwing that out there.

The third article I want to talk about is how Malaysia has dropped the world's first AI bank. The thesis is that it is not just a digital front-end for a bank in Malaysia. They're really creating a brand-new bank focused on how do you remove the infrastructure of a traditional bank, no actual branches, things along those lines. Giving younger Malaysians an opportunity to create the TikTok banking fast, personalized, zero-friction.

[00:10:02] Robyn Bolton: It was interesting reading about it because I do my digital banking, but every so often, there's something where I do like to go into a branch because it just feels so much safer. So the idea of like AI is just immediately thinking like, oh gosh, is this this like souped-up chatbot because those things never work.

[00:10:18] Brian Ardinger: Right

[00:10:18] Robyn Bolton: The way the Ryt Bank it's called is design is it very much is a chat like, hey, pay my electric bill. Can you transfer money from here to here? Oh my gosh. Like that's just so much more intuitive and natural language and how kids these days, you know how the younger generations, that's how they work with the phone. That's how they work with technology. It just makes a ton of sense.

[00:10:44] Brian Ardinger: It looked like, and again, I couldn't do it, I'm not on Malaysian, based on what I read and what it saw, it was very much like onboarding for a game. You know, you basically put in your mobile number, take a picture of your face, very easy to set up, and put your first deposit into the bank, and then again, have access to this new way of banking.

And I thought about it in a couple different ways. One, it was the innovative way in the banking space in general. And then I started thinking about, well could something like this actually be executed in like the United States and what are the barriers and things that would prohibit an existing bank to think about banking in a new or different way?

And I think that's one of the things that, again, always holds back corporate innovation a lot of times, is the fact that the first initial response is like, we can't do that. We have regulations. We have different ways to do this. We can't get rid of our bank branches.

[00:11:34] Robyn Bolton: It reminded me a lot. How would a traditional bank respond in the early days of the internet when newspapers just put images of their newspaper online?

And also, a lot of the conversation that we're having now around AI were, as companies are implementing AI, they're realizing they're having more success by completely rethinking processes. Instead of trying to adapt what they do to AI, they've created something from scratch. Without trying to work with the existing infrastructures and workflows.

I was saying earlier that what fascinated me is that the two companies behind this bank, one is C Technologies, and they are the leading digital payments and services provider in Southeast Asia. So that makes total sense. But the other is this company called YTL Corporation. They are an infrastructure developer, so they build physical buildings and physical infrastructure, which seems like the exact last thing they would want is to help create a digital-only bank.

So, I just found that combination of founding funders really, really interesting.

[00:12:50] Brian Ardinger: The other thing that struck me when reading this is what's happened in the past is happening in the future. I spent some time in Hong Kong back in the early dotcom era with the division of Ion Global, and we were building out basically internet infrastructure for HSBC Bank and Cathy Pacific Airlines. And back in the day when it cost, you know, $4 million to build a website, our company was doing that. And I was in charge of the research division to help figure out how do people use these new technologies.

And what made me think about that is we had a, an Australian bank at the time that wanted to create the new digital bank. Which didn't exist. And a lot of the similarities for what they were doing today with this Malaysia Ryt bank versus what this Australian bank was trying to do. Very similar mindset, but they're just using the newest, latest technologies of the day to try to create new ways of doing it.

What I found interesting is that experience was 20 plus years ago and a lot of the same things as far as the benefits that they're touting or the exact same things they're touting today. Just using a different technology stack, being AI versus the internet as a way to connect with customers.

[00:13:53] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, that is interesting. Because pry all looking at this and being like, this is so disruptive and you know, with the benefit of hearing your experience, like is this really disruptive or is this an evolution? The technology is enabling, but the fundamental jobs to be done are the same, and so we're just evolving as technology evolves.

[00:14:13] Brian Ardinger: And it seems like the companies that embrace the innovation are embracing it from how do we create a different customer experience, so the ones that are not just taking it from, let's again create a new tool set to do something faster, cheaper, better, but it seems like this right bank and, and what we were working on back in the day was how do we literally change the customer experience. Give the customer what they actually need or want. And as consumer trends change in that, like we were talking about the younger TikTok generation, is how does banking change and can you create innovative things because of focusing on that customer versus focusing on the technology or things along those lines.

[00:14:49] Robyn Bolton: Absolutely, and especially thinking about all that we hear about with the shifts in generations in terms of their priorities or even feasibility. We talk about in the US, you know, the student loan debt and the odds of buying a house. And those are all things that mortgages are things that banks are set up to do.

And if people aren't buying houses, you know, to your point of really focusing on the customer, it's as always, exactly smart. Because otherwise change will be thrust upon you

[00:15:17] Brian Ardinger: Exactly. If you're not doing it yourself, you might as well try to make a go at it yourself.

The last segment is Tactics to Try. This was "all in week" at Nelnet, and this was our annual gathering of our 5,000, 6,000 employees. And each day there's something cultural, and that, talking about how do we get "all in" in what we're doing. And one of the opening speakers, a good friend of mine, Kaiser Yang, who spoke at our conference last year, came out and was talking about some case studies and things that he's seen in the world of innovation.

One of the things he talked about, I'm going to call it innovation shopping. It's basically going to a grocery store and proactively picking out something you haven't tried before. When you go into a grocery store and you want to buy bananas. You get to choose which bunch of bananas, like do I buy the greener ones and so it'll last longer, or do I buy the ones that are really ripe right now and I'll, I'll get that.

But half of them will go bad in three days. So, he was talking about a company in South Korea that tackled that problem. Interesting thing about is they decided to put together a package, six bananas, but each banana was a different shade of ripeness and so you could buy in one, sitting with one package, your six days worth of bananas without having to throw out the whole bunch.

And I thought the idea of, you know, turning things around, thinking about the problem in a different way. Person's not just buying bananas, they're buying bananas that they could space out over, over time and that, which is an interesting tactic of going innovation shopping and, and seeing what those new innovations and how that spur new information and, and new innovation for yourself.

[00:16:49] Robyn Bolton: Oh, I love that. Somebody needs to come up with an avocado equivalent of the bananas. Same thing. Yes, because those are a mystery as to when and how they ripen. So now I love that. And you have inspired my tactic because I'm going to take the opposite approach, which is innovation shopping, innovation cleaning out.

Still sticking with the food theme, but looking around your refrigerator or your cupboard, and what are the things that you buy that always go bad? Like the proverbial, at least in our household bag of salad that gets purchased every trip to the store because you want to be the person who eats healthy and has a salad, but then it always just gets chucked on trash day.

So, what are the zombie projects, the zombie food items that, it may be tough, that's the reality, but just to be like, hey, you know what, we're just not going to buy this anymore. And if, for whatever reason, I really do have a craving for a salad, I'll just go out to eat or go to Panera or whatever your local deli is and take care of it that way, but. I'm going to stop buying the zombie salad.

[00:17:57] Brian Ardinger: I love that tactic and hopefully, people will get some value out of that. Thank you again, Robin, for co-hosting Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to the next episode and write us, email us, let us know how we're doing, and what topics and interesting things are happening in your innovation world. We'll see you next time on Inside Outside Innovation.

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, content, or 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.