On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Robyn and I talk about hiring talent, tips on growth, why everything looks the same, and why nobody wants advertisements on their refrigerators. 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 Interview Transcript by Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

[00:00:35] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and I have our co-host Robyn Bolton. How are you, Robyn? 

[00:00:48] Robyn Bolton: I am good. I've been busy playing Boston Tourist. I've had my sister and her family in town, so we have done all the Boston touristy things, the Freedom Trail, the Duck Tours, visiting our respective alumni colleges. All of that fun stuff. 

[00:01:05] Brian Ardinger: Plenty of Samuel Adams?

[00:01:07] Robyn Bolton: As our duck boat guy tour pointed out, Sam Adams is buried in the old grainery bearing ground, but across the street is a bar. The only place in Boston, you can enjoy a cold Sam Adams while looking at a cold Sam Adams. 

[00:01:20] Brian Ardinger: I have been to that bar and did that exact thing. Yes, it was quite fun.

[00:01:23] Robyn Bolton: Excellent. And how are things in your neck of the woods?

[00:01:26] Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I've been spending a lot of time focused on hiring and interviewing folks, so last podcast we're in this process of hiring our new Catalyst interns for the year. In addition to that, I'm on a selection committee for hiring for somebody in the startup ecosystem.

And what it's got me thinking about is how job hunting has changed and trying to find candidates. And then secondly, like hiring for innovation roles and how that differs than hiring in your traditional roles or a known quantity. It's really opened my eyes, not only for myself, but like people on the committee, how they think differently about hiring for these particular roles.

You know, focused on curiosity or speed of learning. And when you're looking at candidates, how do you figure out who possesses those particular types of skills and that 

[00:02:12] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, no, it is a real challenge. I used to, at Clayton Christensen's firm, for a while I was in charge of recruiting and then kind of shifted on to the hiring committee. And it really is a challenge because I'd be looking for people who are interesting and have done unique things and kind of crazy wild things that you're like, wow, how did you come up with that idea?

And then I would have colleagues who'd be like, well, I'm not sure they have the PowerPoint skills. And I was always like, we can teach them PowerPoint, right? I don't want to have to teach someone how to think but can also see their point where it's like. I also don't want to teach you the basic skills of the job. It's a challenge. Yeah. 

[00:02:50] Brian Ardinger: The other thing is, the Catalyst intern role is early college students, and the other one is a more professional role. And so even between age and types of openings, trying to find what are those key levers and what can different people bring to the table when it comes to talent.

[00:03:05] Robyn Bolton: You're searching for unicorns.

[00:03:07] Brian Ardinger: Well, let's start the podcast with some of the things that we've read this week. One of the first articles that we wanted to talk about today came from Jeff Gothelf. He has a blog called Continuous Learning. He actually spoke at the 2019 IO Summit.

Jeff was talking about some experiences that he's seen, and the name of the blog post is No One Wants Ads on their Fridge. And it goes on to talk about how Samsung's latest innovation is an $1,800 fridge that shows advertisements. So the New Smart Fridge will be a walking billboard in your kitchen. He goes on to talk about why that may not be a good idea.

[00:03:43] Robyn Bolton: It kind of sounds like the worst idea ever because I still watch TV that has ads. Well, I mean, streaming still has ads. And when the commercials come on, that's when I go to the fridge. I don't want to see ads when I go to the fridge. And also, if I'm going to be forced to watch ads, I want the fridge to pay me. No, I don't want another billboard in my house. It's a terrible idea. 

[00:04:09] Brian Ardinger: It makes you wonder that Samsung's not a, a dumb corporation. How could they fall into this particular trap where they clearly probably didn't test this or if they did test it. It was testing for a different use case scenario than the majority of people I would imagine want in their kitchen. What are your thoughts on testing products and how this might have happened? 

[00:04:27] Robyn Bolton: I suspect you're right. Either they didn't test it or they tested a different kind of prototype, but I think it all goes back to what we've talked about before. Innovation is something new that creates value. So often I feel like companies forget that implied in that creating value is creating value for the customer, not just creating value for the company.

And so I feel like with Samsung, you said there are no dummies there. They're really smart folks, and they're like, Hey, this is innovation because it's creating value for us. I cannot comprehend a story where it's creating value for the customer. 

[00:05:04] Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It will be interesting to see, obviously, they have a lot of products and they're probably thinking, well, how do we leverage what's on your TV into the living room, into the kitchen? And then obviously the proof will be in the pudding as far as how do they execute this. But just like Jeff, I think the thing that struck our minds was this can't be a good idea. So, we'll see if an or becomes one. 

[00:05:22] Robyn Bolton: Well, and now I'm imagining ads following me of, you know, I get up while there's, you know, a Domino's Pizza ad and it just follows me to the fridge to be like, or you could have Digiorno in the freezer.

[00:05:32] Brian Ardinger: Well, and then you'll have AI-based Siri talking to you in the background, telling you what to do as well. So, alright, well, the second article, or actually it's not an article, it's a YouTube clip, Lenny's podcast. If you follow my newsletter. A lot of times, I've actually posted about Lenny and his newsletter. Does a great job of finding interesting guests and talking about interesting subjects.

His latest podcast is an interview with Albert Chang, who is head of growth at a variety of different subscription-based companies like Duolingo and Grammarly, and I think currently at Chess.com. And his interview with Albert really talks about the growth role within a corporation and how do you find like hidden growth opportunities in your product?

I encourage folks to go out and take a listen to the entire interview, because it goes through a lot of different topics. But some of the things that, you know, I found interesting about the whole thing was really focusing on this idea of growth and understanding what growth means to like a new startup or a new product.

Understanding that the growth person's job is to connect the users to the value of the product faster, better, cheaper than you can do before. So that core concept of how do you connect the value of the product to the user as fast as possible. 

[00:06:43] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, it's a great episode. Totally echo that. Folks should go out and watch the whole thing. And the idea of growth. I feel like growth is the new innovation, although it was always innovation. You don't innovate just to innovate. Innovation is always a means to an end, and the end is growth. And so, it's awesome that we are having that conversation talking about, especially I think the unsexy parts of growth and innovation of like, Hey, let's look at what we already have that we're not taking full advantage of. That will create value, could create value. And we just need to highlight it and make people aware.

It's an awesome conversation. You know, he talks about, I was a huge fan of Grammarly, big Grammarly user, and then it kind of went round the bend on AI. Got really aggressive and like, Ooh, tone it down. You know, he tells stories about how highlighting what the features of pro to the free users. It absolutely worked. It got me to upgrade and then AI got me to downgrade. You know, showing me, Hey, this is the value you could be getting was brilliant and super effective.

[00:07:56] Brian Ardinger: Similar to like a Duolingo, some of the things that this concept of you can overplay your hands as far as you can growth it, growth it up to a certain amount, and then it becomes annoying to the user. My 13-year-old son is on Duolingo at a 600-day streak or whatever, but he's constantly complaining like, I got to get off this thing.

[00:08:12] Robyn Bolton: As I said at the beginning, I had, you know, family in town and at one point I walked downstairs and my sister, my brother-in-law, my niece and nephew, all four of them were on Duolingo on their own devices because they had streaks to maintain. And there's also some competition therein, right? Creating value and also a little bit of addiction.

[00:08:31] Brian Ardinger: Couple other interesting things I found in the interview talking about how retention is a big missing opportunity for a lot of startups in that. And they overlook the retention side. They're always talking about growth, about filling the top of the funnel. But if you're not keeping those people using your product and, and engaged and happy about that, you're going to be behind the eight ball.

So it costs so much more money to find a new person to try and get them into your funnel. Then it does to keep that person. So having the mindset from a growth person to like retention is one of those key components. 

[00:09:02] Robyn Bolton: Completely. It's, it's growth and retention. 

[00:09:04] Brian Ardinger: I think the last thing that came out of this is the focus on experimentation. You know, these companies, again, are, are big startups, but the amount of experiments that they run on a regular basis to just test and tweak things and understand how their users are using it and testing their assumptions was quite impressive. Is it just Silicon Valley startups that are doing these things? Or how can other non-traditional types of corporations use this focus on experimentation to build out and make their products better? 

[00:09:33] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I think a lot of companies and a lot of executives will look at that part of the podcast or the video and be like, oh, well, they're software companies, so of course it's easy for them to run tests and prototypes.

Yes, and it's also very possible in a physical world, in a world of professional services or whatever business you're in, to run experiments. And you know, it's not going to look like AB testing, or you know, software AB testing, but you can kludge together things. You can, you know, test out a security system in one conference room.

Years ago, I was working with somebody who had a connected blood pressure cuff. And so, like we just need to make sure that people will use this, but of course, everyone will know how to use a blood pressure cuff, right? Because we've all had our blood pressure taken. So, we just dropped it in the nurse's station at the corporate office for a day.

And I can assure you nobody knows how to use a blood pressure cuff because the number of people who are putting it around their ankle or somebody put it around their neck.

[00:10:34] Brian Ardinger: You just squeeze that bulb. That's all right.

[00:10:36] Robyn Bolton: Right. You just squeeze the bulb wherever the band is, even if it's around your neck, but like that's an experiment.

[00:10:42] Brian Ardinger: One experiment that sticks out in my mind back in Asia when we were building up websites for Cathay Pacific Airlines and HSBC Bank, and that. We were putting ideas through experiments and trying to understand how people were using this new technology called the web. And being in Asia, one of the things that our team had built out this form that we wanted the users to fill out, and it was focused on China. And so, they designed the form such that put the last name first and the first name last.

Amazon had gotten to the market quick enough that it had actually created a different user behavior than what was traditionally thought of. So they had to go back and change the form to a more traditional American first name, last name nomenclature, which was again, totally unintuitive.

And it goes back to, you can't just build something based on your assumptions. You've got to go out and figure out, you know, is this really something that the users are going to experience? And sometimes it's counterintuitive to what actually, you know, the culture is or otherwise. 

[00:11:36] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, no, that's a great example. I mean, who would've thought? 

[00:11:40] Brian Ardinger: Alright, well the third article is from Hriday Checker. He's got an article talking about why everything looks the same in 2025. The basic article talks about the fact that how is everything becoming like if you look at, look at the web, look at your mobile device, look at pretty much every application, the similarities between buttons and cards and how people navigate the world.

And, and maybe this comes back to the, the thing I was talking about with the form that we had tested 20 years ago. Everything starts becoming the same when you have similar inputs and similar functionality being tested. And what are your thoughts? 

[00:12:18] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, so. Everything looking the same. I mean, it, it kind of is, right? Like it's all round, you know, boxes with rounded corners and infinite scroll and all that stuff. And I think it's a double-edged sword. I feel like corporations have probably the past decade started seeing design as a really, really key skill and capability and, you know, something that they really want to have as core to their organization, which is awesome.

Corporations are still corporations where they want to play it safe. They want design to be part of their ethos. As long as the design is safe and looks like everybody else's, it's going to drive kind of a bifurcation of you're gonna have design as safety, and then design is radical, creating the new path, and there will be very little in between.

[00:13:12] Brian Ardinger: One of the quotes in the article talks about, you know, we're living in a time where innovation often feels like iteration. And originality gets sanded down in the name of scalability, safety, and familiarity. And then you start thinking about, well, how does that affect a person who's creating a new product and that?

And like even nowadays, so rise of vibe coding, the rise of all these internet tools, the rise of all these templated tools, which makes it very easy to spin up and experiment or test something. But are we losing something by relying too heavily on the past standards and the ways to quote unquote scale and, and make it familiar? Is that the best use case scenario all the time. 

[00:13:49] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, it reminds me actually before we start, you know, you talking about looking for talent of do we go with what's tried and true and what we know to be safe, or do we take a little bit of a risk? And I think we're in such a period of change in every aspect that that's kind of a constant question and a constant tension probably that we're feeling in every aspect of our work.

[00:14:12] Brian Ardinger: How can you change the parameters and that so that if you break out of the sameness, will that create additional value? And it'll be interesting to see that the companies that try that. 

[00:14:21] Robyn Bolton: And I can assure you putting an add on my refrigerator is not, is not how to create value by breaking out of sameness.

[00:14:29] Brian Ardinger: Alright, so we're now at the, at the part of the podcast where we try to throw out a tactic to try for the week. What I've been thinking about this week is some tactics as I talk about innovation and to talk to folks, you know, outside quote unquote the innovation space. It's something I wrote about in my book around the idea of the power of language.

And Jack Elkins, he's a friend of mine who used to run the Innovation Lab at Orlando Magic. He talked to me about how they had created an environment where they were constantly testing the language that they were talking about to not stifle innovation. So it can be as simple as like using different phrases when you're having conversations about new products or new services.

So, things like just saying "we can if" and just, you know, opening up the conversation to having a possibilities or discussion that's more favorable than, you know, saying, "well that'll never happen" or "that'll never work." The whole, you know, "yes and" versus "yes but." Using things like "how fascinating" or "how cool" to encourage the person to suspend their judgment and go on and, and continue on that train of thought.

Asking questions like "what else" or "why." And then finally like "how might we accomplish this X despite Y." So calling out the particular constraints and trying to overcome or look at it from a different perspective and just those simple tweaks to your language of how you present problems or solutions and how you have conversations about innovation can go a long way to not closing those off and giving you the opportunity to build from that.

[00:16:00] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I love it. I'm totally going to piggyback on that because you made me think about. When I'm in front of my students. I teach an MBA course on corporate innovation. And I've learned that if I say, okay, what questions do you have? Nobody has any questions. And look, I was totally guilty of that too when I was a student.

So, I've learned to say, you know, kind of put the onus on me and be like, what was I not clear about? What can I tell you more about? What did I tell you too much about? As I ask for questions, which we always do when we're presenting a problem or a solution, we want questions, is to take the onus off of the people to be like, you don't understand something to say, Hey, maybe I did something not enough, or unclearly or too much, and it overwhelmed you. So, talk back to me to help me be clearer. Yeah, and it's amazing.

[00:16:57] Brian Ardinger: Open dialogue. Opens up that dialogue and gives the person permission without shutting down a conversation. 

[00:17:03] Robyn Bolton: And they don't worry about looking stupid in front of their peers because they're not. I guarantee if someone has a question, there are at least 10 other people in the same room who have the exact same question.

[00:17:13] Brian Ardinger: Well, if anybody has a question out there from our audience, please do send them into insideoutside.io. Thanks for coming up to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation, and we look forward to seeing you next time around.

[00:17:24] Robyn Bolton: All right. See you soon.

[00:17:25] Brian Ardinger: Take care.

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.


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