On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Robyn and Brian sit down to talk about divergent thinking, peak college towns, and how as little as 250 documents can poison your AI. 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 Miles Zero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

[00:00:40] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and I have my co-host, Robyn Bolton. Hello, Robyn.

[00:00:47] Robyn Bolton: Hello, Brian. How are you today?

[00:00:49] Brian Ardinger: I am doing well. Episode 338. We're excited to talk about innovation. I'm so glad you're on the journey with me here.

[00:00:56] Robyn Bolton: Wow. 338. There should be a cake or streamers or something.

[00:01:01] Brian Ardinger: Well, as usual, we've got a number of different articles and things that have caught our attention over the last couple days. So, I figure we'd dive in. And the first article I wanted to talk about today was for my friend Audrey Crane. She works at Design Map, and she posted on the Design Map blog an article on Divergent thinking.

The article, I'll give it a little preface. So, it was looking at how you generate better ideas. Looked at a lot of things. First of all, looked at the research and the fact that there's a famous study by George Land and Beth Jarman looking at how five-year-olds were asked to come up with as many uses as possible for a paperclip, and nearly all of them, 98% could generate 200 or more ideas.

They continued to do this study and looked into adulthood, and by the time the participants became adults, only 2%. Of adults could actually do the same thing and generate 200 ideas about a paperclip. It's pretty crazy, and it points to the fact that, while it's a super important skill to have, to be able to generate new ideas and think about different things. We are losing that ability as we get older.

[00:02:08] Robyn Bolton: It was surprising and sad, but reminded me of two things. So, one is a book that came out a long time over a decade ago now, the Innovator's DNA. Where the authors looked at, you know, across hundreds, thousands of successful, both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, corporate innovators.

And they found that the one thing that they had in common, or most had in common, was associative thinking, which. Is being able to put two very different ideas together to make something. And so divergent thinking actually reminded me a lot of the associative thinking. Because it just, your brain works in different ways.

And the second thing is, you know, I teach at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and in talking to my actual art colleagues there, one of the things that they say that's very consistent with what we say in innovation, is that your first idea, your first work, your first version is always the worst.

They have different language around the idea of constraints and don't accept the first version, but that is a very common discipline within the art and design world. That it's just your first idea is going to be terrible, so you've got to push past it. And that was another aspect of this article that I found really interesting.

[00:03:29] Brian Ardinger: It fits into startups as well. I was mentoring the new batch of NMotion companies are going to be announced here soon that are going through it. And did a little round table and met each of the teams and talked about what they're building and that. And the piece of advice I left them with is, you are here on day one with your idea. Be open to other ideas that happen when you start talking to customers and trying to understand if, if you really are onto something.

Because a lot of times you get into an accelerator or you get some early traction and you think, okay, I've got all figured out. I got the solution. I'm just going to barge ahead. But you have to be open to that divergent thinking and different ways of doing things just so you don't necessarily leave opportunity on the table.

[00:04:08] Robyn Bolton: It's the old adage, right? The fall in love with the problem, not the solution. And it's so easy to fall in love with the solution, but the divergent thinking article was a great reminder. Data-based reminder of why we've got to nurture the skill to go beyond that.

[00:04:26] Brian Ardinger: Yeah, and I love the article too, because Audrey goes into a number of different techniques, brainstorming techniques, and that. Mm-hmm. So, I encourage people to check that out, to learn some tactical things about how you go about building up that divergent thinking muscle.

The second article, this one made me a little nervous. It's from the Neuron Daily, which is a fantastic newsletter, and this one came out a couple weeks ago, but the title was Poisoning AI Models just got scarier. 250 documents is all it takes.

And it goes on to look at some research that came out of Anthropic that looked at the number of documents that you could ingest into the LLM that would make it start spewing out nonsense and making it bad. The original thinking was, well, the more larger models that you have, you'd have to have more malicious documents put into it to make it go off the rails. What they found out was that's actually not the case.

It takes a very small amount of wrong data to be put into it to actually make it start going the wrong direction. Actually, I think in the article talks about a 13 billion parameter model trained on 260 billion tokens, got backdoored with the same 250 documents as the 600 million model trained on just 12 billion tokens.

And previous research assumed that attackers needed to control 0.1 of the training data. And so for larger models you need millions more documents. What actually happened is the math was 250 poison documents was, is only 0.00016 of the training data was enough to actually poison the model itself. Crazy stuff to think about it.

When we think about. All the things that'll be putting into the web and everything else. It's a wonder why we're not seeing more and more hallucinations. I guess

[00:06:07] Robyn Bolton: it was terrifying, and I'll be honest, the numbers went so over my head, but it had an analogy in there. It's like putting a teaspoon of a toxin into an Olympic sized pool. Yeah. And you'd kill all the swimmers. And I was like, uh oh. That is. So much more awful than I thought when you were just saying 250 documents.

And you know, I think it just goes to pis. There's incredible promise with Gen AI and there's risks that we don't even know about. It's one of those things of use with caution.

[00:06:39] Brian Ardinger: It'll be interesting to see what other research comes out to either debunk this or to fill up the back holes of this. But it's just something to keep in mind and follow the research and see what's actually going on out there. Because we are in brand new territory and the exploration mode, we need to be wary of the pitfalls that are ahead as well.

[00:06:57] Robyn Bolton: 250 documents. It's so little.

[00:07:00] Brian Ardinger: Alright. The third article this week is from Kyla Scanlon. She has a new book out focusing on the Economy. She's a rising star in the space and has become a Gen Z influencer in the economic space, if you can believe that. But Kyla has a piece called What Happens to College Towns After Peak 18-year-old.

And the article goes on to talk about, we think about like the Rust belt and how the economy changed and all those towns were decimated once manufacturing left. What's happening in the new world when universities, for example, are leaving these smaller towns and can't keep up with the enrollment and what happens when basically entire portions of the economy and portions of the United States have to rethink one of the core tenants or the core economic engines within their backyard?

[00:07:50] Robyn Bolton: This one hit real close to home. You know, I've... grew up in Cleveland, part of the Rust Belt. My dad's from Western Pennsylvania. He literally grew up in a city called Oil City. So, you could imagine what happened to that when the West Belt dried up. And you know, I went to school at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, which Oxford, Ohio exists because Miami is there and there's nothing but cornfields around it.

And so I saw the old group of my life being reflected in this article and. The statistics she cites around college enrollment, around population ages and trends. It paints a really bleak picture that, you know, I hadn't really considered before. She proposes some interesting solutions, but I just always think about Oxford, like if Miami went away.

There's no reason for that town to exist, and you could turn the dorms into startup incubators. You can do all that stuff, but why is anyone going to be a solid hour and a half from Cincinnati in the middle of a cornfield?

[00:08:58] Brian Ardinger: And I think a lot of people underestimate the fact these small colleges, what there effectively are is talent engines for the economy. And whether those folks don't always stay around, the fact that you have new people every year coming into the ecosystem and participating in, in economically and otherwise, it is a flywheel engine that if you start pulling away from that, and there's a lot of factors that are, you know, causing this.

If you look at the statistics of just the number of kids, I think we, this year was the, the peak. What's going to be the peak of just people that are turning 18 and capable of going to college, that's falling. Enrollment across all institutions, I think dropped 12% between 2010 and 2023. So that's 18 million students down to 15 million students.

And this is happening around the backdrop also of, you know, NIH research funding cuts. Many, many states are pulling back on the research dollars that they're putting into the universities. And so all these factors are, are effectively cutting off our nose despite our face as we're trying to compete and innovate into the new world, we're taking away all the resources of whatever that new economic engine is.

[00:10:00] Robyn Bolton: I have to put my jobs to be done plugin here 'cause the article talks about, she went back to her alma mater, Western Kentucky University, and what was striking to me in the article is that the majority, I forget the percentage, like 67% or something like that of people who applied to attend Western Kentucky, the vast majority who didn't attend, didn't attend any school.

And so it just, the competition is completely different in and amongst everything else that universities are facing. So I just thought it was a really thought provoking article that also was slightly terrifying in a number of ways, and also did not have a perfect solution because nothing has perfect and simple solutions these days.

[00:10:48] Brian Ardinger: Well, and I like bringing up these particular topics because it's not just all about business world and, and how can we improve our, the day-to-day tasks and make our teams better. I think it's important as an innovator to think about the larger economic things that are going on, the dangers that are out there, the opportunities that are out there, and, and being open to new sources of information so that you can start making different types of connections when you are innovating in various forms.

We'll try to make the next one a little bit lighter. We had a bonus article this week in the newsletter talking from Entertainment Weekly, talking about the 31 best sci-fi movies of all time. So, what's your take?

[00:11:25] Robyn Bolton: So I, I was tracking pretty well with it. The top five or ones you'd expect, like 2001 Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of a Third Kind. I was surprised. I think number three was back to the future. Which I never even considered a sci-fi movie, but I was like, oh yeah, I guess it would be. And it ages pretty well. And so, I was tracking with it. And then we got down to, I think it was 23, and it was Starship Troopers, and I have never seen that movie.

I've seen parts of it as I've walked through the living room and it didn't strike me as a great movie, but in talking to my husband and he watches sci-fi movies, he's like, no, there's a cult following people love it. But number 24, so behind Starship Troopers was The Empire Strikes Back.

[00:12:11] Brian Ardinger: I know. Yeah, you in the top, whatever.

[00:12:14] Robyn Bolton: At that point, the entire list was nullified, and I'm like, no.

[00:12:18] Brian Ardinger: It was interesting. I'm sure it was 32 on the list. There's other ones out there that are probably should be on that list. Maybe they should make the next one a 50, top 50 list. I would have to agree with the number one, I can understand 2001 Space Odyssey. You know, the coming of Hal, and yeah, it still is, is relevant today. Even maybe more so relevant than before.

If I looked at the list and, and tried to pick my favorites out of it, I would have ET is one of the top ones on the list. From the standpoint of I was that age, probably when ET came out. I like going back and watching that particular movie. Because we could all use a little humanity that the scary creature is doesn't always have to be scary, and we don't have to send the army after it to, to understand what's going on. And then the other one that piqued my memory was the Planet of the Apes.

The idea of, you know, going into this multiverse and you end up in the same New York that you in the future and it's not what you expected.

[00:13:08] Robyn Bolton: Really surprised that one wasn't higher and I noticed. There was not a single Star Trek movie on the list.

[00:13:14] Brian Ardinger: That's true as well.

[00:13:15] Robyn Bolton: And you know, I'm not a Trekkie, but I know Trekkies, and I think a lot of people would be like, the Wrath of Khan should have been somewhere in the top 31. I was surprised by that, but I'm with you on ET. I'm like, oh, that should have been higher.

[00:13:28] Brian Ardinger: The one that I think maybe gets on the list next year would be her, primarily because it's playing out in real life. You know? I know when it came out in 2008, but it seems to be fairly on point if you haven't seen that one.

[00:13:40] Robyn Bolton: It may be moving to the documentary list.

[00:13:42] Brian Ardinger: Alright, well let's wrap up with some tactics to try. I was thinking a lot this week about some of the things that we, you know, have talked about and that. And one of the tactics that I always like to talk about is this idea of wandering the cave and the idea that innovation is very much like going into a dark, scary cave where you've no idea what you're going to encounter and your job is to pick the cave, that idea, that area of interest, and start fumbling forward.

So I think a lot of people think that they can innovate and find the answer by thinking, but a lot of it requires you to go into the cave. Requires you to fumble around. Requires you to go out and explore and test and try things to figure out if it's the right path or not. The key to that is to take action and, you know, actually pick a cave and, and go for it. So that's my tactic to try. What's your cave you're going to pick this week to go after and, you know, learn something new or explore a little further.

[00:14:35] Robyn Bolton: Yep. And remember the falling in the mud and touching the slimy walls. It's part of it. The cave is messy. It's okay, you'll survive. So my action was actually inspired by one of the articles we talked about of try to come up with 200 uses for a paperclip. I have a paperclip sitting on my desk. I have a notebook next to me, and every time an idea comes in my head, I write it down for the paper for clip. I've been doing this all week. I've just cracked 50. I don't know how long it's going to take me to get to 200.

[00:15:08] Brian Ardinger: You're about a 10-year-old level now,

[00:15:10] Robyn Bolton: Maybe, hopefully. But I'd also say like it's a fun activity to do as a family, especially if you have different age groups or you know, different friends with different perspectives. So, look at the paper clip. Come up with ideas.

[00:15:21] Brian Ardinger: We'll check back in on the next episode to see how the list is going. Thanks for coming out for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. We'll see you next time.

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.