On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about youth culture buzzwords, calculating the value of your innovation teams and how your side project won't save you anymore. 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.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

Youth Culture Moves Faster Than Innovation Cycles

[00:00:40] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And with me I have Robyn Bolton from Mile Zero. Welcome back, Robyn. How are you? 

[00:00:48] Robyn Bolton: I am great. How are you doing, Brian? 

[00:00:51] Brian Ardinger: I am doing well. We're excited to have another opportunity to talk about innovation and its various forms. Maybe we'll just get right into it. 2026 is moving very fast. One of them that popped up is from the Substack AfterSchool by Casey Lewis. Casey is an amazing person who really looks at youth culture. And the article that she has just published is Buzzwords that Define 2025 and Youth Culture in Review.

And she spent her Substack culminating all the things that she had been researching in the year 2025, looking at youth culture, what are kids looking at? How are they talking everything around that particular space. And came out with a great article that gives you a highlight of what it's like to be Gen Z.

From Feeling “Old” to Feeling “Ancient”. Generational Language Gaps

[00:01:33] Robyn Bolton: Reading this article, I already felt old, this made me feel ancient. Because I hear all this stuff, all the slang and everything. I'm like, yeah, I'm up on my slang. I don't know what any of it means, but I at least have heard it. And then I read this article, I'm like, I have heard none of these terms. I mean, some of them are like Lemony Miso Hutu Schwan. I can't even say it. Ego scrolling. Zen Dia theory. Ballerina Cappuccino. I had actually heard of that one. I was like, wow. I have gone from hearing terms and not understanding them to being so old and ancient that I haven't even heard them. It's a great view into. What's going on in Generation Alpha.

Analog Revival and Escaping “Slop Life”

[00:02:19] Brian Ardinger: She talks a lot about how 2025 was defined by Gen Z's seemingly endless enthusiasm for pre-digital experiences. You know, which is a counterintuitive to what we think about, especially in the space that we live in and technology and innovation. But there seems to be a big push, especially the younger folks around, how do they not have all this stuff define them and or control them, which is kind of interesting.

Physical media is coming back in unprecedented demand. Everything from Pokemon cards to vintage CDs, et cetera. Talking even about how New York City schools have phone bans that have sparked a rush to kids bringing in rector watches. So bring back the Time Max and the Casio, and teaching kids how to actually rediscover what analog timekeeping is.

I thought that was fairly interesting about what she's seeing in the youth culture. And then of course, she has some great terms that we'll probably start seeing pop up. We've seen six, seven, but that's come and gone. But things like slop life where acceptance of overstimulating, low quality consumption is the default mode. And how do you get out of slop life?

Things like festivals, which is, you know, you have this festival culture like Coachella now, but the ship is now moving towards live streaming and at home experiences rather than physical endurance of a two and a half day in the sweaty sun for a festival. And what I think about all these kind of things is what stood out to me is the importance of understanding this, not just if your audience is youth culture, but the importance of customer discovery and living with your customers and understanding how they think, how they act, how they talk, and the fact that the speed of these culture changes are shifting so fast.

As soon as you figure it out in the mainstream, it's already been moved to the next thing, the next meme, et cetera. And so as a corporate innovator, as a startup, being focused on customer discovery, being focused on living with your customers, being focused on keeping up and keeping pace with what's going on is so important.

You Can’t Read Your Way Into Understanding Youth Culture

[00:04:15] Robyn Bolton: The pace of change, I mean it just, the fads, the trends, the terms, the language, the slang, it moves so much faster, certainly than when I was growing up. The other thing that really struck me about some of the buzzwords was just that they were a sign of how plugged into the broader world that kids these days are.

You know, they had terms like Recession Core things like Algorithmic Blandness, that AI is just on the horizon and there's already slang term for the perceived same across social media feeds. 

I feel like Gen Alpha, Gen Z is so much more plugged into the things going on around them than certainly we were as teenagers, and they already have slang and language around it and respond to it and interact with it. You have to spend time 'cause you can't read your way to understanding these upcoming generations.

Measuring Innovation. Money Is Not the Only Investment

[00:05:15] Brian Ardinger: So, if you want to keep in touch with the youth culture, definitely subscribe to Afterschool by Casey Lewis. She's following those trends for you, so excellent. Alright, the second article is Calculating the Value of Your Innovation Team by Tristan Kromer.

Tristan is a great friend of mine, he's a mentor at End Motion back in the early days, and Tristan has a blog that talks about all these things, lean startup, et cetera. And he has a new article calculating the value of an innovation team, and he's been spending a lot of time working with innovation teams to help them understand how do you actually measure and monitor your innovation efforts.

So, he talks about in this article, you know, when venture capitalist fund a startup, you know, they allocate money because the money is what the startup then uses to build or try or experiment, et cetera. But when it comes to corporate innovation it's not just about the money that's given to a corporate innovation team. It's about the people and the time that you allocate towards that.

He talks about how that oftentimes is missed in corporate innovation efforts. They may fund a particular prototype or that, but they don't necessarily think about or fund or measure the amount of human time that's actually required to do these things. And so oftentimes you have bad decisions or bad outcomes because you're not actually measuring and monitoring what you need to to get the complete innovation effort through the system.

Headcount, Cognitive Load, and the Real Cost of Innovation

[00:06:33] Robyn Bolton: Just so much amen to this article, and because it points out, it starts off with a very, very common scenario of you've gone to the innovation board, you've pitched your idea, they've given you $10,000. Great, but you still have a job that takes up a hundred percent, 150% of your time. And so that $10,000 doesn't include your time.

And the point he makes, it was just like a light bulb that went off in my head. because I'm always advocating around you need to dedicate resources to innovation. And I've always fallen back on the cognitive load of having to shift from creative thinking to operational thinking that no one can do that, certainly at a whim.

But he points out that the difference between venture capitalists when they give money, that money includes paying for talent. But because of accounting and corporations headcount is considered separately from investing cold, hard cash into innovation projects. That is absolutely true and I think that's a fundamental barrier to getting companies to feel comfortable allocating headcount or even partial headcount to an innovation project. Because they automatically go to, well then we have to backfill. And now there's lots of issues associated with that.

Politics, Territorialism, and the “Baby Bird” Problem

[00:07:53] Brian Ardinger: Was working with a company. They had multiple different divisions, and they were working on A RFP to win this project. And they required some particular talent or something from one of the other divisions. And so, they had to get permission to put this team written into the RFP. So, they went over to the other division and said, hey, we'd like to write this team into this particular RFP proposal.

And they were told no because they had been fully allocated for Division Two's workload in that. And there was a couple things that were striking to that one, it was the political nature of, well, this is my resource and you can't have it. And then secondly, this was even in like the RFP process, so this was not even work that had been won and could be taken away from somebody.

It was just the pure nature of this is my resource and in the event that you win the RFP, I don't even want them to have that chance to win that RFP because you know, this is our particular resource. And I think there's a lot of that territorial nature when it comes to people, and I think that's something you have to be very careful of in the innovation space.

The other thing on the corporate innovation side, when it comes to the teams, and that is, you know, oftentimes you have these silos of innovation teams that are working outside the core and that baby bird syndrome of they've created something interesting, but it's kicked out of the nest and will never get back into the nest.

Those are some of the things that you've got to be cognizant of when you're spinning up new ideas inside or outside of the organization. And how do you manage that political slash resource side of the equation?

Why Ignoring Organizational Politics Is a Strategic Mistake

[00:09:22] Robyn Bolton: The politics cannot be underestimated, overestimated. It’s just politics are real in companies and especially the headcount. You know, I know I've worked with a lot of clients where in order to be at a certain level of your organization, you need to have a certain number of direct reports. And so if somebody comes over and says, Hey, I need this direct report for an RFP is in your story, all of a sudden it's not just that I want to hoard this person because they're great at their job, it's if I lose this person am I going to get a title reduction?

You need to be aware of this. You need to factor all of this in as you're advocating for your idea and how to move forward. It's complicated, but it's also very real. And ignoring it doesn't make it go away.

When MVPs Are Cheap. What Proves Real Skill Now

[00:10:07] Brian Ardinger: Well, those are things to consider. Tristan does a good job of helping you think through that. All right. Our last article for this week is Your Side Project Won't Save You Anymore from Alvis Ung. Alvis has got a Medium blog post that talks about the fact that one, anyone can ship an MVP in a weekend, what does shipping actually prove? Pre AI actually doing the work and creating a MVP or prototype or whatever took a lot of time and effort in that.

And when we are living now in a day where you can prompt something into existence, how does that change how you find talent? How does that change how do you know if somebody's actually got the chops to do what you're looking to do? And how does that change the game for anybody in the workforce to create value?

So, I thought it was an interesting article to talk about the speed at which a lot of this is happening and the reduction of cost that's out there, as well as the proof of work, and how that's is changing the world as well.

Hiring in an AI World. From Outputs to Thinking

[00:11:01] Robyn Bolton: This one really made me pause and think because at first glance was like, well, look at this. This is pure disruption. It is democratizing everything. And then. I just put myself in a hiring manager's shoes and not being able to distinguish the portfolio of somebody who legitimate has all these skills internally versus somebody who uses AI and kind of relies on AI to do this. 

It got me to thinking, putting my hiring manager hat on, that it would force me to get really clear about why I need the skills. It's not as simple as listing off, oh, hey, do you know Swift? Do you know various programming languages? Can you do these things? It's kind of like, why? Why do you need those things? What do you need to prove to me that you do know these things so great.

You can show me an app, you can give me a beautiful portfolio, but how successful was it? And even how I would define how successful isn't it needs. To tie back to what the role is. So it really made me think, but then I realized it's really is going to make a lot of HR and hiring folks think to make sure that they get the right talent.

Code Is Cheap. Judgment Is Not

[00:12:10] Brian Ardinger: He talks about the fact that the code is now cheap, or if the code is cheap, it's the thinking behind the code. That's the important thing. So how do you measure that and how do you understand if a person's got the chops around that, not just the end product, which again, is a complete reverse for a lot of folks that have done this in the past.

I think the other thing around this is you've moved the starting line to the finish line. I think that's how he phrased it, is like now you're looking at what the end product is and how they got there is important, but understanding the thought process behind it is just as important as the actual end product. Quite interesting.

Tactic to Try. “Normal” Is Not the Same as “Okay”

[00:12:43] Robyn Bolton: It's a big change. Everything's changing. 

[00:12:46] Brian Ardinger: Well, our last section is tactics to try. If you have any tactics as you want to throw out today. 

[00:12:51] Robyn Bolton: Tactic inspired by a conversation I had. Bottom line was I was complaining about something. The person I was complaining to said, oh, well that's normal. And my response was, well, it's not okay. It got me to thinking of how many things that we just take for granted in our lives is normal, are actually not okay. And there's big things that are normal and not okay. There's little things that are normal and not, okay.

My tip, something I've been doing something I would call out to our listeners to do is, you know, find something small in life that's normal and not okay. You know, I have a lot of friends who complain about meetings. I'm like, yeah, pointless meetings are normal and not, okay. So can you say like, I'm not attending this meeting unless there's an agenda. 

[00:13:37] Brian Ardinger: Right.

[00:13:39] Robyn Bolton: It's not going to solve stupid meetings, but it'll maybe make them shorter or less painful. So I'd say find normal and not okay. 

[00:13:46] Brian Ardinger: If nothing else that forces you to think through what is normal and what is not okay. Yes, and I think that's a great way to end this particular episode. Thanks everyone for coming out to Inside Outside Innovation. We'll see you next week. 

[00:13:57] Robyn Bolton: Bye.

[00:16:26] 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.