On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Robyn Bolton, author of the new book, Unlocking Innovation. Robyn and I talk about the Innovator's journey for unlocking architecture behaviors and culture of innovation and ways you can measure and map your progress. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with  Robyn Bolton, Author of Unlocking Innovation

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Robyn Bolton. She's the founder of Mile Zero and author of the new book, Unlocking Innovation: A Leader's guide for Turning Bold Ideas into tangible results. Welcome, Robyn. 

Robyn Bolton: I am so glad to be here. Thank you. Brian. 

Brian Ardinger: Thank you for coming on the podcast. We've been friends, and long-time listeners of the podcast and newsletter from Inside Outside should be familiar with some of your work. You came out and spoke at our Inside Outside Innovation Summit in 2022, but since then you've got a lot of stuff that's happened. So, I wanted to have you on the show to talk about your new book that's coming up today. Yeah. And talk about innovation. And maybe a little bit of background on how you began your innovation journey. 

Robyn Bolton: So, I began my innovation journey purely by luck straight out of undergrad. After graduating from undergrad, went to work at P&G in brand management and was put on the team that was developing some new cleaning products. And a year after joining the team, we launched Swiffer. 

So, I was part of that kind of amazing journey of corporate innovation. And all the experiences and the scars and, and all of that. And then kind of fast forward a bit, moved up to Boston, got my MBA, did some consulting work in one of the big firms, but then spent almost a decade at the firm that was founded by Clayton Christensen.

Nearly a decade immersed in not just disruptive innovation, but all the different types of innovations that companies do and the challenges that companies face. And then since 2018, have been running my own firm. Mile Zero, which has continued to focus on corporate innovation and really supporting the leaders and the teams who are doing that hard work.

Brian Ardinger: You do some great writing and that. If you've followed our newsletter, I try to find the best articles every week to disseminate to our audience, and you come up there fairly regularly. Stuff that I want to... 

Robyn Bolton: I am always quite honored. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about writing. So, you have a new book out called Unlocking Innovation. What made you decide to write another book on innovation and what is the secret nugget that you wanted to talk to your audience about? 

Robyn Bolton: So, I resisted writing a book for a long time because it's like the last thing this world needs is another book on innovation. But eventually I broke through my own resistance 'cause you know, in reflecting on my career in innovation, I realized that like, hey, the Innovator's Dilemma came out in the late nineties and in the 30 years since that happened, the results, the success rate of corporate innovation has not changed. 

And all that's changed in 30 years is we've kind of had this innovation industrial complex get created of consultants, guilty books now guilty, articles, all this stuff that's grown up, but it hasn't changed the success rate.

And I got curious as to why that is. And I think it is because, and this is what the book focuses on. Is that we've tend to take a really siloed approach to innovation. You know, we come in like, you need this team structure, or you need this process, or this governance, or on the other end of things, you know, we need to build a culture of innovation.

And the reality is, is you have to take a much more holistic approach, which I call the ABCs, that you need to have the architecture of innovation to the process structure strategies. It's necessary, but not sufficient for success. You also need to be really focused on leadership behaviors and how leaders are interacting with innovation teams, how they're supporting innovation.

And you need a culture that, at least at the very beginning, isn't resistant to innovation. So, you need to be working on all three of these things, all of the ABCs all at the same time, but in different ways as the team progresses. 

Brian Ardinger: I think one of the challenges you find with that is oftentimes if one or two people have been given the mantle of the person who has to figure that out. And this is very difficult as a director of innovation or whatever you want to call those folks to be able to move that battleship in in the right direction a lot of times. 

Robyn Bolton: Yes, absolutely. And it gets even harder when, you know, you look at the research and I think it's something like 90% of innovation teams get shut down within three years. Yeah. So, you're tasked with moving a battleship or an aircraft in three years, and you know, we all know that three years doesn't mean you actually have three years to produce results. You have to produce results really in two years so that you're able to keep working in year three before you get shut down.

So, it's this crazy short period of time that you have to produce results and you're working on something that is really a long-term investment. So you have all of these contradictions that as someone who's in charge of innovation, you've gotta grapple with. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, and I think the biggest challenge is the fact a lot of folks don't really understand how difficult that exploration process is to find a winner, quote unquote. In your book, you mentioned a stat, something like one in 50,000 incubated ideas ever reach a million dollars in sales. And so, you think about those types of odds and the types of shots on goal you have to consistently make to explore through that maze of crazy new, bad ideas, to find one or two that actually starts getting traction and making it 

Robyn Bolton: Yeah, exactly It, you know, when you think of, okay, I need incubate 50,000 ideas to get one that makes a million dollars, and oh by the way, the resources allocated to innovation are usually like two people and $10. Yeah. So, the odds are very much stacked against you. But I also know, I mean, you and I both know as innovators, like that doesn't deter you.

You see the potential and you're like, no, we can figure this out. We can do this. And so, this book is very much written for those folks who are the rebels, the realists, and the fixers who are like, no, no, no. We see the potential. We could do this. We're going to give it a shot. 

Brian Ardinger: We talk a lot about finding the curious and the restless within your organization that have more of the tool set skill sets, mindsets around innovation. Knowing full well that, you know, most people aren't going to have those particular skills. But having said that, my thesis at least, is that we should be teaching these skills to everybody, whether they become a founder or a, you know, a person on the innovation team. These tools and the things that you learn by innovating can help you in your day-to-day job, regardless of if you're spinning up a brand new million dollar idea. 

Robyn Bolton: Absolutely. The curiosity, the critical thinking, the kind of creativity with, I'll say a lower c. 'cause everybody's like, oh, I'm not creative. It's like, okay, you don't have to be Picasso to be creative. So yeah, the skills are absolutely transferable, but so often I see companies kind of say like, everyone's an innovator. And I was like, yeah, everyone can be. Everyone can learn to be, but not everyone wants to be. And so, for those folks who love to be the operators, who love to be the experts and just like hone in on doing something amazingly well, let them, love them for it.

And the folks who are the curious and the restless, like you said, teach them, empower them. Yeah. And help, you know, train those skills and mindsets. 

Brian Ardinger: You talk about in the book that the art of innovation is not an idea problem, but a leadership problem. Can you unpack that a little bit? 

Robyn Bolton: Every organization is full of people and people are full of ideas, and so there's never a shortage of ideas in an organization. As a leader, as an executive, you may not be hearing ideas. That doesn't mean that people don't have them. You may be hearing ideas and they're not big enough, or they're not on strategy. Again, as a leader, that falls on you to help people figure out what ideas are most meaningful. You know, that's kind of where you get idea challenges. 

But overall, the reason I say that innovation isn't an idea problem, it's a leadership problem, is because leaders are ultimately the ones making the decisions, especially around resources. And you know, how many people do we allocate to something? How much budget? And you can tell an organization's priorities by how they allocate their resources. 

And so when you say innovation is a strategic priority, and I tell the story in the book of we need $250 million from new businesses in the next two years, and then you put two people and $10 to it, people in the organization see that gap and you're not walking the talk.

Brian Ardinger: Let's unpack the book a little bit. One of the interesting things I, I like about is you do talk about this year one, year two, year three process or journey that folks should go through. So, what are some of the pitfalls or things that you're going to encounter as you're trying to spin up some of this stuff, and what are some of the ways that people can navigate that? 

Robyn Bolton: Year one is great. Everyone's enthusiastic, everyone's on board, and that is when you can get to stretch too far. So, one of the first things to do in year one is to figure out what is in and out of bounds for the innovation work you do. And that is both along things like what projects do you work on, how do you work with other parts of the organization, but then you personally as a leader of innovation, what do you want to work on and what don't you want to work on?

And where's there flex there? Because you're going to need to stay motivated and positive and excited throughout this three-year journey. So easier to do that if you're working on things you're passionate about. You also need to, and I know a lot of people will not love what I'm about to say. You need to put a dollar amount on what innovation is going to deliver.

Ultimately, it's about dollars and cents. You need to have metrics that other people in the organization can look at and can measure your progress against. And you know, I talk about figuring out the growth gap, figuring out what that revenue is that innovation needs to deliver because the organization doesn't have line of sight to filling that growth gap.

Brian Ardinger: Let me pick on that a little bit, just from the standpoint of, yeah, how do you know, especially when you're launching a brand new, I mean, I guess it depends on what type of innovation and how close is it to the core versus adjacent or transformational. And you know that at the early stages you're probably going to be guessing.

And so is your recommendation that the innovation leaders should guess to match the needs of the leadership folks and figure out as they get there, or how do you balance the fact that the truth is truly unknown, whether we're going to be able to make this particular idea a million dollar idea? 

Robyn Bolton: Yeah. So, it's actually starting at the end and working backwards. So, I tell the story in the book of an organization I worked with that they're like, oh, we've got this innovation thing figured out. We're fine. We don't need to make big investments. And we did this very simple math problem where I said, okay, you've promised X to the street. You'll deliver this revenue in five years.

You know, let's take a look at your strap plan. What do you have line of sight to, and, you know, we found a, a many, many, many million-dollar gap between those two numbers. And honestly, the organization looked down and they're like, yeah, no, we're fine. We can totally fill that with our innovation portfolio.

And then I'm like, well, that's the equivalent of two Facebooks, right? So, are you going to build two Facebooks in five years? Right. like, wow, that's impressive. And that then opened up everything within the organization. Resources started coming, and we still didn't know what we were going to work on. We still didn't have projects, but suddenly there was a sense of urgency and commitment that hadn't been there before.

Innovation was kind of a hobby versus a true financial and strategic priority. So even doing that kind of simple exercise, it changes the way key stakeholders perceive innovation and make it critically important. And then you can get into the discussion around, do we have the right portfolio? You know, especially 'cause different types of innovation. You know, start earning revenue at different time periods, but just kind of getting that single call to action is huge. 

Brian Ardinger: Talk about some of the metrics or KPIs that you suggest that teams should be looking at early on, rather than just strictly, you know, dollars and cents or profit and that, how can you start measuring if you're on the right path?

Robyn Bolton: I think of it in two buckets. There's activity metrics and impact metrics, and early on activity metrics are easiest, right? You can say like, you know, we've got this many new ideas. We're incubating this many ideas. And those are really important to have, especially, you know, year one, year two. 'cause you're not going to have revenue metrics or order metrics or anything like that.

Certainly, until year three at the earliest. Year two though, when you need to be showing results is where you need to get, I say a little creative of, yes, you're still showing the activity metrics, but you need to also be showing impact metrics around kind of how you're helping the organization. So, you know, your team unearth insights that you were able to hand off to an existing say a brand team and the brand team was able to use that to create something.

So, finding ways to show impact, at least internally in the second year that you can then kind of through a few hops tied to revenue is really, really critical to making sure you survive the full three years. 

Brian Ardinger: A lot of change in the innovation space, like you said, over the last 30 years. A lot of people know all sorts of new frameworks from lean startup and design thinking, everything else that's come through that in your years of developing a new product like a Swiffer, what would you do with today's knowledge that you could apply to the next Swiffer that you'd be developing?

Robyn Bolton: So probably the biggest thing that I would, I would apply to the next, the next big, you know, billion-dollar idea is the experimentation. Kind of along the lines of Lean Startup, I think, you know, when I was working on Swiffer a long time ago, Design Thinking didn't have a name yet, but that's what we were doing.

We were spending a lot of times with consumers talking to them, testing with them, getting their feedback. What has changed and what I would do differently is the way we tested Swiffer was in a test market. We're like literally, we launched it into Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. And thank goodness those test markets went well, because if they didn't, we wouldn't have been able to figure out what was the root cause of the problem.

So, you know, tools like Lean Startup, like Rita McGrath's Discovery Driven Planning. And running those experiments, what I like to call the scientific method applied to business. I would do that first before going into the full-on test market. 

Brian Ardinger: How do you see new tools and like AI's hot topic, and I've seen a lot more people trying to use AI in the innovation space per se. What have you seen out there and, and what are your thoughts around that topic? 

Robyn Bolton: So, AI, I'm a big fan with all the caveats of, you got to double check it, but like I have actively used it in consumer research, in creating personas, consumer journeys, all of that discovery work. Big fan there. I've seen a lot of companies start using it in kind of design sprints to come up with ideas, you know, name ideas, come up with example logos, and it absolutely can speed things forward, which is great.

Especially if, if you have to create 50,000 ideas to incubate, but we can't forget that AI can only tell you what's already known. So, it's rate for core innovation. It can be really helpful for adjacent Innovation if you're looking at radical or breakthrough innovation. AI is not your answer. 'cause you have to create that. You have to come up with the idea. 

This kind of gets back to one of the things that that's really important is having different types of innovation and kind of knowing which tool to apply. 'cause if you want to use AI to create the next world changing thing, you're going to be very disappointed. 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I agree. What I've seen obviously is getting better, but I think the challenge is making sure that people understand the power of it, but not getting too tied into the immediate impact that it's going to have. Like it's a tool. It's a tool. It's a tool like a spreadsheet, back in the day, spreadsheets were amazing. Are they going to change the world? We don't know yet but continue to use and play with it and see, see what happens with it. 

Robyn Bolton: Yeah. I mean, the fact is innovation is all about solving problems for humans. Yeah. And so, humans have to be involved. Like you said, AI is a tool, but that's all it is. 

Brian Ardinger: What are some of the counterintuitive pieces of innovation advice that you've either received or given or come upon as you've written this book?

Robyn Bolton: Oh, that's a great question. You know, certainly counterintuitive is do you have to have results quickly? Because that's, again, indirect opposition to the idea of innovation as a long-term investment. You know, certainly that you shouldn't try to make everyone an innovator. Let people be who they are and support the folks who want to innovate.

You know, and I think also this kind of, the main thesis of the book is that innovation success rises and falls on leaders. You know, you can have the most brilliant idea, and I, I tell this story. This is the story of Victor in the book, of having this wildly successful idea that because kind of one simulation said it was going to fail, it almost got killed.

Leaders really do affect everything, and if you don't have the right mindset as a leader, if you don't have the commitment, the courage, the patience, and the understanding, the leaders are the ones who end up killing the ideas and for very good reason. I don't mean to be hating on leaders like I totally get why they're making these decisions? 'cause they're logical. It's like you get incentivized for delivering this year. Innovation isn't going to deliver this year, so why would you invest in something that feels like a crapshoot versus a certain thing? So that's why there's real tension and, and that's why it's about leaders, not ideas.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and that's why I like the process that you talk about. It's, it's, it's about experimentation and, and collecting that evidence along the way. So that you have a better thesis or a better reason to, to continue that particular journey of innovation so that it doesn't have to be, well, I think your idea is great, so I'm going to fund it.

Or I think your idea is bad and I'm not going to fund it. The more we can get into helping people understand what they're doing and what they're de-risking and how they're de-risking it and have evidence to back that up. Better chance they have to move those ideas forward. 

Robyn Bolton: Yep. And figuring out what the evidence needed is upfront. One of my favorite quotes that I heard from a client was, what do you need to see in order to say yes and asking that question early in the process versus later.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Brian Ardinger: Right. And being off track when you don't have a large chance to pivot or change. This has been a great conversation. I, I love having you on the show. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that? 

Robyn Bolton: Certainly, LinkedIn is always the, the easy way. Robyn M Bolton. To learn more about the book, you can go to unlocking innovation.co and you can download a free sample of the book, kind of get that free first chapter, give it a read, and then go from there.

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. I encourage everybody to grab a copy. It's great. I love everything you do. Robyn, thanks for being on Inside Outside Innovation and looking forward to continuing the conversation in the future. 

Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Absolutely. 

Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.

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