50: Simon Hill - 50 Episodes In: Lessons from the Innovation Frontline

53. Deepa Krishnamurthy - The parts beneath the parts

Deepa Krishnamurthy began her working life as a cost accountant on the floor of a tractor plant in India, surrounded by production schedules and inventory. From there, her path ran through finance, real estate, investing, Harvard — and, decades later, somehow all the way back to the factory floor. She likes to say it feels less like a new direction and more like a great many separate paths finally converging. Today she's the co-founder and CEO of Nterprisers, and she's here because she thinks we're telling ourselves the wrong story about American manufacturing. There are hundreds of thousands of manufacturers scattered across the country — small, mostly family-owned, almost all privately held. They make the parts beneath the parts: precision-machined components, specialty fabrication, the tooling and subassemblies that quietly hold up the whole economy. And here's the strange thing — most of them are nearly impossible to find. The tidy story goes: the factories closed, the work went overseas, the industry declined. Deepa will tell you that story is mostly wrong. Manufacturing didn't disappear — it became invisible. The companies are still there. The skills are still there. The knowledge built up over decades is still there. What thinned out was the connective tissue — the dense local networks that once let manufacturers, suppliers, engineers, lenders, and investors find one another. Her core belief is simple, and I think rather profound: we cannot strengthen what we cannot see. Visibility comes before connection. Connection comes before integration. And integration comes before growth. Before highways, there were maps. Before marketplaces, there were the humble systems that let people find each other in the first place.

52. Samuel Arbesman: Decay, Wonder and Where Knowledge Lives

Samuel Arbesman is a complexity scientist and writer. He is passionate about bringing together seemingly unrelated ideas from science and technology. Samuel works with companies and founders that recognize that the future happens at these boundaries, in such areas as open science, tools for thought, managing massive complexity, artificial intelligence, and infusing computation into everything from biology to manufacturing. Samuel’s scientific research examines such areas as scientific discovery and network science. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, and he was previously a contributing writer for Wired. Samuel is the award-winning author of Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension and The Half-Life of Facts. His most recent book is The Magic of Code. In addition, Samuel is a Senior Fellow of The Silicon Flatirons Center at The University of Colorado, and a Research Fellow at The Long Now Foundation. Previously, Samuel was a Senior Scholar in Research and Policy at The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a Research Fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He completed a PhD in computational biology at Cornell University and earned a BA in computer science and biology at Brandeis University.

51. Samuel West - The Honest Truth About Failure

Innovation is lonely work. Sam West built a museum of failure to make visible what organisations hide — and found it gives people permission. Working in innovation is lonely. You're usually pushing against the culture, not with it. You're the person asking "why not?" in rooms full of people paid to say "because." You try things that don't work, often in public, and the organisation's instinct is to move on quickly and quietly rather than ask what happened and why. In startup land there are spaces for this. F**k Up Nights — actual events where founders get on stage and tell the audience what went wrong — have become a real phenomenon precisely because there was nowhere else to say it. The relief in the room when someone is honest about failure is palpable. You can feel people exhale. Corporate innovation doesn't have that. It has words about failure — "we celebrate learning," "there are no bad ideas," "fail fast" — but not much else. The language of failure tolerance is everywhere. The actual practice of it is rare. And the people doing the hard work of trying new things inside large organisations often feel like they're doing it alone, without cover, in an environment that will quietly hold it against them if it doesn't work out. Samuel West, Founder and Curator, The Museum of Failure; Organisational Psychologist; PhD in Organisational Psychology, Lund University, has spent a decade studying exactly that gap. He built a museum full of things that failed — from global corporations to billion-dollar bets — precisely to make visible what organisations prefer to make invisible. The effect it has on people is not what you might expect. It doesn't make them cynical. It gives them permission. When you see that Apple, Google, and Procter & Gamble get things catastrophically wrong, something shifts. The fear shrinks a little. The risk feels more possible. He has also, as it happens, lived through a very public personal failure of his own — declared bankrupt over the museum itself. Which gives him a credential that no PhD can provide. This conversation is for anyone who has ever sat in a post-mortem and felt like nobody was really saying what happened. For anyone who has ever killed a project and felt they had to pretend it never existed. For the person who is doing innovation work right now and wondering why it feels so unrewarding even when they believe in it.

50: Simon Hill - 50 Episodes In: Lessons from the Innovation Frontline

50 episodes. 4 seasons. One stubborn question: what does it take to make innovation work? Simon Hill looks back at the lessons so far.  One stubborn question: what does it actually take to make innovation work? In this special milestone edition, host Simon Hill steps out from behind the interviewer's chair to look back at the conversations, characters and ideas that have shaped the Total Innovation Podcast so far. From Aidan McCullen and the polyvalent players of Toulouse Rugby Club, to Steve Rader running 850 challenges for NASA with a team of just twelve, to Gina Lucarelli's 90 UN accelerator labs built on "directed improvisation" — Simon revisits the moments that stuck. Along the way he draws out the threads that connect rugby pitches to lunar missions and Faroese entrepreneurs to financial services boardrooms: innovate where you differentiate, know your planted foot, reward the right kind of mistakes, and never assume the best answer lives where you expect to find it. It's also a chance to reflect on Expected Value, Simon's book on closing innovation's measurement gap, and the central thesis behind the whole series — that innovation rarely fails because of bad ideas. It fails because of bad systems. Part retrospective, part manifesto, this is a reflection on making the invisible visible, and a marker on the road to the next fifty.

49. Mike Butcher MBE: Tech, Truth and Finding the Path

MIKE BUTCHER (M.B.E.) IS THE FOUNDER AND EDITOR OF PATHFOUNDERS. HE WAS FORMERLY THE EDITOR-AT-LARGE FOR TECHCRUNCH [https://techcrunch.com/] FOR 18 YEARS. HE HAS BEEN A TECHNOLOGY JOURNALIST SINCE 1995. HE HAS WRITTEN FOR UK NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES AND BEEN NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN EUROPEAN TECHNOLOGY BY WIRED UK. HE HAS SPOKEN AT THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM, WEB SUMMIT, AND DLD. HE HAS INTERVIEWED TONY BLAIR, DMITRY MEDVEDEV, KEVIN SPACEY, LILY COLE, PAVEL DUROV, JIMMY WALES, AND MANY OTHER TECH LEADERS AND CELEBRITIES. MIKE IS A REGULAR BROADCASTER, APPEARING ON BBC NEWS, SKY NEWS, CNBC, CHANNEL 4, AL JAZEERA, AND BLOOMBERG. HE HAS ALSO ADVISED UK PRIME MINISTERS AND THE MAYOR OF LONDON ON TECH STARTUP POLICY, AS WELL AS BEING A JUDGE ON THE APPRENTICE UK. GQ MAGAZINE NAMED HIM ONE OF THE 100 MOST CONNECTED MEN IN THE UK. HE IS THE CO-FOUNDER THE NON-PROFITS TECHFUGEES.COM [http://techfugees.com/], TECHVETS.CO [http://techvets.co/], AND STARTUP COALITION [https://startupcoalition.io/].   HE WAS AWARDED AN MBE IN THE QUEEN’S BIRTHDAY HONOURS LIST IN 2016 FOR SERVICES TO THE UK TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY AND JOURNALISM.