This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

I first met John Fitch while I was CTO of Twyla and recruited him to head up my product team. John and I quickly became great friends and I always enjoy our time together. Shortly before I founded Voltage Control, John left Twyla to join Tom Serres on his newly minted agency and venture fund, Animal Ventures. Animal Ventures keeps John on the road so our time is limited these days. It was a pleasure to reconnect with John on a recent trip and talk about innovation.

When John was studying documentary filmmaking, Apple launched the first iPhone. Having honed his documentarian skills of considering multiple perspectives, he saw how the iPhone was going to have a huge impact, and he was eager to see how it would change the world. Looking back on his transition from filmmaking to product design he sees their common goal: aligning an audience around an experience.

“I think at the core of good product thinking is curiosity and the mindset of a documentarian. You have to understand a lot of perspectives and then forecast a story that connects all of them.”

Incremental vs Moonshot Thinking

Being committed to innovation requires self awareness and adaptability to unconventional thinking. When John works with teams he encourages individuals to pay attention to patterns in how they think in order to understand if their ideas are coming from the incremental mindset they use for business-as-usual or if they are challenging themselves to what he calls “moonshot” thinking. Moonshot thinking, as John describes it, is the difference between improving something 10% or 10x.

Throughout his work John has found that it’s the mental heavy lifting required for moonshot thinking that often trips up innovation programs particularly when team members aren’t fully dedicated to the effort. For a contributor whose time is split 50–50 between innovation projects and their daily grind, John finds that just as their shift to moonshot thinking starts gaining momentum they are often pulled away back to the incremental mindset of keeping the lights on. This level of context switching introduces time waste and creates a jarring experience.

Innovating Beyond the Business Model

Approaching innovation with a scarcity mindset can be detrimental to innovation, beyond just robbing it of necessary personnel. On a larger scale it can mean canceling an innovation program at the first sign of recession or a fall in revenue. John views this mindset as limiting due to its narrow focus on today’s reality when the products of innovation are often what save a company five years down the road. Or in the words of Buckminster Fuller, “You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”

“You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” — Buckminster Fuller

John credited the investors of Twitter with truly embracing this idea as we discussed their path to success. Before Twitter, Evan Williams and team were preparing to launch a podcasting app called Odeo. When Apple debuted the iPhone with its native podcast app pre-installed, the Odeo team was forced to reevaluate and come up with a new idea. Instead of accepting a refund of his investment, Odeo’s main investor, Mike Maples, got curious about the team’s new idea. The pitch for a microblogging platform captured his attention (and his investment) and out of that worst case scenario came Twitter.

Achieving Alignment

Beyond big thinking, successful innovation programs require team alignment around a common goal. In order to achieve alignment among his teams and clients, John uses a technique called note and vote. Through this technique team members are provided quiet time to come up with new ideas and write them down. Each idea is then discussed as a group and the decision to proceed on a particular idea is determined by a group vote. For John the power of this technique comes from the chance to explore concepts quietly without being influenced by the ideas of others.

“Your mind enters a different space when you take away the intensity of talking.”

In addition to providing the focus to brainstorm, note and vote allows for a variety of different personality types to contribute equally regardless of where they fall on the scale of introversion to extroversion.

Learning & Unlearning

When experiments don’t produce expected results John manages to view failure not as disaster but as active learning by taking the time to capture the details in an experiment retrospective. “It has to be centered around unlearning and keeping track of what didn’t work, why, and how do we account for this in our next experiment.”

“It has to be centered around unlearning and keeping track of what didn’t work, why, and how do we account for this in our next experiment.”

To put this into practice John’s team took on a project to create their own internal tool that incorporates all the aspects of their methodology into one place. In John’s words, the tool functions as air traffic control to manage the various aspects of multiple ongoing experiments across the company.

One measure he and his team have incorporated into the tool is a proprietary project health score which measures four different aspects of a project as well as tracking team morale. The tool provides everyone at the company one place to get an overview of work in progress and learn from completed experiments. “It’s influential in the way that it organized all of our beliefs in one place”

Measuring Moonshots

For teams and organizations seeking to measure their innovation efforts and outcomes, John recommends Andy Groves’ OKR model and John Doerr’s book: Measure What Matters. John’s team is currently experimenting with getting their OKRs specific enough to measure progress while also incorporating moonshot thinking large enough for a 10x impact. Rather than scaling down to incremental goals that fit within the OKR framework, they’ve tweaked it slightly and opted to measure progress incrementally. What John likes most about this approach is that it incorporates the Google attitude that hitting all your OKRs means you aren’t aiming high enough.

In addition to giving due consideration to what success will look like, John believes it’s equally important to envision what failure might look like before a project begins. It isn’t uncommon for John to hear frustration from teams that some ideas aren’t given the time to produce results before a company moves on to another idea. His advice in scenarios like this — talk about when to give up before you start. “It’s a way of inverted thinking that allows you to explore the conditions that are important to you.” By forecasting failures teams can not only define a stopping point, but they can also identify missteps to look out for on the way.

Staging & Stewardship

Gaining confidence with initial findings and accelerating too quickly can spell disaster for innovation projects. At this stage John believes it’s important to strike a healthy balance between being excited about the work and staying disciplined enough to ensure a project is implemented or scaled properly.

After a prototype has proven successful, John recommends taking the time to stage, stress test, and consider edge cases. Beyond the project itself, John believes more consideration is owed to stewardship once the project is implemented.

“There should be a lot of deep thinking and ongoing experiments before the experiment replaces any existing systems. It should be evaluated with both technical and social lenses.”

This means considering the makeup of the team who will support the tool or system going forward and ensuring they have the proper context.

Insanity in Innovation

What John loves best about innovation is when practitioners really push the limits of its potential impact. He rehashed the Google Chrome birth story and shared with me his admiration for how aggressive the Google engineers were with their OKRs.

In 2008, the Google team set an aggresive OKR to make the web as fast as flipping through a magazine and thus develop the next-generation client platform for web applications. Larry and Sergey wanted the people working on this to be uncomfortably excited and “have a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

They set out to reimagine the browser and identified a need to turbocharge Javascript setting a moonshot goal of 10X improvement. That goal inspired Lars Bak (a legendary programmer) to signup for the challenge. Within four months, he had JavaScript running ten times as fast as it ran on Firefox. Within two years, it was more than twenty times faster.

“I think you have to fundementally believe in something many others think is insane and go for it to be successful.”

Making the Intangible Tangible

When discussing some of his lessons learned over the years John shared a quote from Reid Hoffman, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” This is a philosophy John pushes himself to incorporate into his daily work.

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” -Reid Hoffman

In addition to documenting failure and the factors that led to it, John believes it’s also important to critically evaluate the people you target for user interviews and prototype testing in order to have confidence in your findings.

And when it comes time to demo the work John stresses the importance of understanding your audience — an executive accustomed to working primarily in the user interface may struggle to appropriately evaluate a blockchain tool that utilizes command line.

In these scenarios John challenges his team to make the intangible tangible through storytelling to enable their audience to provide meaningful feedback and understand the result of their investment. One person that John believes gets this right is Elon Musk. Rather than just trying to talk about the concept of the Hyperloop, Musk creates videos with 3-D animations so people can see what this new type of transportation will look like and clearly understand how it could impact their lives.

Cognitive Supply Chain

Over the years technology has suprised John by getting him excited about conventional topics. While at the University of Texas John learned about the classical approach to managing supply chains. However, it wasn’t until he was exposed to the concept of blockchain that his interest in supply chain was truly piqued.

John defines supply chain as “Every process, person, and step involved from something being designed, made, and then delivered.” To demonstrate he challenged me to consider the lifecycle of a Topo Chico bottle. Beyond just putting the cap on the bottle, a number of people are involved in creating the glass bottle, designing the label, importing the product across the border, delivering merchant orders, and ensuring it is received and paid for, etc. Throughout this process there are a number of opportunities to introduce delays and waste through expiration or latency that impact a company’s bottom line.

Blockchain provides visibility into the state of anything in the process, and when paired with machine learning it can help companies predict patterns and issues before they occur. The combination of blockchain and machine learning or cognitive supply chain, means that zero waste, zero latency — a goal once thought impossible — is now within reach.

Systematic Change

The paradigm shifting minds of Joseph Lubin and Vitalik Buterin, cofounders of Ethereum, are two people John credits with truly systematic change. He sees blockchain as the nexus “where governance, computer science, philosophy, and economics meet.” And while one could argue that other blockchain platforms are technically sound, John finds in Vitalik the attitude of an innovator citing his regular appearances at conferences, frequent contributions as a thought leader on blockchain, and his ongoing leadership in today’s R&D. While some may say dismissively that Ethereum is still a prototype, John gets excited because it’s a prototype out in the real world upon which people are building and experimenting.

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post The Insanity of Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the end of this article for links to others in the series.

Here’s two stunning statistics that venture capitalist Kerry Rupp shared with me: only 2 percent of venture capital dollars are going to women-led startups and 83% of venture-backed companies don’t have a single woman on the executive team.

General Partner at True Wealth Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund in Austin, Kerry is working to change that. True Wealth invests in women-led companies, especially in industries where women are the primary customer, and focuses on consumer health and sustainable products and technologies.

Only 2 percent of venture capital dollars are going to women-led startups. Kerry Rupp’s True Wealth Ventures is changing that.

For over 20 years, Kerry Rupp has launched, developed and grown startup companies and new lines of business for established firms. As the prior CEO and General Partner at DreamIt, a Top Ten US startup accelerator and early-stage venture fund, Kerry was directly involved with the launch of over 150 companies. Kerry mentors at Capital Factory in Austin and other startup hubs in Texas and is judge or coach on many local and national start-up competitions. She is also a nationally-certified instructor for the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program.

I was excited to talk to Kerry because she brings the investor’s perspective on innovation and entrepreneurship. Here are some takeaways and big ideas from our conversation.

Viability Above All

I like to start with a deceptively simple question when I talk with experts in this space: “How do you define innovation?” It gives me such great insights into how the interviewee thinks and the unique perspective they bring. Kerry’s answer gave me a sense of how grounded and customer-focused she is: “I’m always looking at [innovation] from the business opportunity and the viability of a business as opposed to innovation for innovation’s sake,” she said. “It isn’t the idea in and of itself. It’s the problem space the idea is attacking and how big that market opportunity is…”

“It isn’t the idea in and of itself. It’s the problem space the idea is attacking and how big that market opportunity is…” -Kerry Rupp, True Wealth Ventures

Kerry looks for business ideas that solve a genuine and pressing consumer need. As she puts it, it should provide: “significant value to someone, where they’re willing to change behavior and adopt something new because it actually solves a problem for them or creates a benefit for them.”

She brings this point of view to her teaching role at the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps and that way of thinking is somewhat unique in the scientific space. “The whole premise of basic research is to discover things that you don’t even necessarily know why they matter. A perspective that I bring to it — having run an accelerator and being in startups — is that the stuff I need to care about in innovation are the things that actually have business viability. That means there’s someone for whom it solves the pain that they’re willing to pay for it.”

For True Wealth Ventures, this also translates to the fact that they don’t necessarily focus on ideas or technologies that are going to take many, many years to develop. They are more inclined to invest in companies that will solve that customer need in the near term.

All About That Team

Unsurprisingly, as someone who decides which companies to invest money in, Kerry talked about the need for strong team dynamics. To her, teams should have both “complementary skill sets, but also the ability to navigate how you actually solve the problem.”

These are personality traits that you can’t necessarily assess quantitatively. It’s more of an art. Kerry tries to evaluate it through conversations and observation with the founder and team. As she says, it’s about:“what they say they’re going to do and how they do it and how they respond to feedback, instead of you’ve got degree X and Y…”

A bit like a prenup in a high-stakes celebrity marriage, Kerry also thinks it’s important that teams talk through foundational things before they embark on their start-up journey. “They need to make sure they have the same work ethic, the same risk profile. They should have open, transparent conversations about their cash situations and their capacity for sticking around when financial [stuff] gets hard…”

The Pitfalls of Corporate Partnerships

One of the topics Kerry and I talked about was what can go wrong when large public corporations get involved with early-stage innovation. Kerry has witnessed tensions in this space that are important for investors and entrepreneurs to keep an eye on. Certainly, there is potential symbiosis for companies and start-ups; both can benefit from the relative cache or “brand” of the other.

While startups can get excited about the value a big name brand can bring them, the big corporate behemoths can drag them down with requirements, slow timetables, and supposedly helpful mentors bringing “old school” ways of thinking. This can quickly hinder the progress of a company just trying to get off the ground. “It’s very hard for big public companies that need to have huge projects that move the needle and have public earning reports to even know what to do with early-stage innovation,” Kerry says.

With this in mind, she shared that she thinks it’s important for both sides to set up expectations and understand where each brings value. For Kerry, she urges founders and investors to “try to understand the value of having the big company participate and what they’re good at and what they’re not good at.”

“Understand the value of having the big company participate and what they’re good at and what they’re not good at.” -Kerry Rupp, True Wealth Ventures

Don’t Be Afraid to Reassess

I asked Kerry to share a success story in the innovation space. The story she told me illustrates the importance of not being afraid to throw out your initial idea. Before she even started at DreamIt, there was a team of students right out of Dartmouth who taught themselves to code with the intention of creating a blog recommendation engine. They started looking at how to monetize their idea and, nearly halfway through the accelerator program, realized there wasn’t much of an opportunity there. Instead of plowing through or giving up, Kerry talked about how they decided to survey the landscape for new market opportunities and come up with a new solution.

Eventually, the team honed in on the ticketing industry for sports and music events and built a company called SeatGeek which, according to Kerry, is “killing it today.”

There are two important things in this story for her. First, she admired the team’s ability to hear what was going on and to change course as needed. Secondly, she liked the “methodological approach” the team took to understanding the landscape, which ultimately led to a smart and informed (not emotional) decision of where to pivot their energies.

Are You Listening?

At the end of our conversation, I asked Kerry if she thinks there is a “silver bullet” for innovation. Her answer connects back to the concept of solving real problems and business viability. She said that for her it is: “..customer discovery. Are you hearing lots of inputs from the customer to validate that there’s something there? You need an unbiased process of listening to understand the customer, their pains, their processes, how they work, how they buy, and how they think.”

“You need an unbiased process of listening to understand the customer, their pains, their processes, how they work, how they buy, and how they think.” -Kerry Rupp, True Wealth Ventures

To Kerry, this ability to listen is an incredibly important aspect of entrepreneurship. But it’s about truly active listening and having what she describes as a “structure against to weigh those factors” and getting “data-driven trends as opposed to just gut or opinion-driven insights.”

I hope you enjoyed reading the highlights of my talk with Kerry Rupp. I look forward to seeing how True Wealth Ventures changes the gender make-up of start-ups. If you want to read more articles with perspectives from innovation experts, check out my articles about Peter Nicholson, Gary Hoover and Kellee M. Franklin.

Voltage Control facilitates innovation workshops and we specialize in Design Sprints. Contact Douglas at douglas@voltagecontrol.co if you are interested in having us facilitate your Sprint, coach your team on how to run an effective Sprint, or are curious to learn more about how to adapt Design Sprints or other workshop techniques to help your company grow.

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