Ep. 195 - Kaihan Krippendorff, Author of Driving Innovation from Within and Outthinker CEO

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kaihan Krippendorff. He's the founder and CEO of Outthinker and author of a new book called Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs.  Kaihan and I talk about how companies are embracing internal entrepreneurship and some of the barriers, skills, and motivations needed to foster innovation within your organization. Let's get started. 

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat for the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. 

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 with me is Kaihan Krippendorff   He is the founder and CEO of Outthinker and best-selling author of a new book called Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs. Welcome Kaihan to the show. 

Kaihan Krippendorff: Thank you for having me. Great to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Had a chance to take a look at the book. It's near and dear to my heart, it’s a lot of stuff that we talk about on the show and we do in real life. I wanted to start by asking, what made you decide that you wanted to write a book about internal innovation? 

Kaihan Krippendorff: I have spent most of the last 15 years helping people inside companies generate ideas through methodology, like a ideation, design, creative thinking methodology, and often when you generate an idea from inside, that goes nowhere, right?  Once the bureaucracy and all that stuff, then a couple of my clients started actually driving these innovations through, and so I said, Hey, you know, is this an abnormality or can it be done? I started researching it and I found that actually the majority of society's most transformative innovations were conceived of by employees innovating from within. And so that just captured my attention. I want to understand that if that's really an important task.

Brian Ardinger: What makes innovation so hard for corporations to get a grasp on and why do you not hear more success stories coming out of it? 

Kaihan Krippendorff: The second question is really the big one. That is difficult, but being an entrepreneur is difficult, right? The failure rate tie is a lot of work and eating ramen noodles and all of that, so it's not that it's easier and it’s just difficult in both cases. But I think that the reason that we don't hear as many stories of internal innovators is that it's not an easy story to tell. It's not the person who went to college gets an idea and goes to the West coast and goes into a garage. We love that Elon Musk, love that Bill Gates, love that Michael Dell story. Its that hero's journey that we like to tell and the story, the internal innovators, its more complicated. 

Brian Ardinger: It makes sense also from the standpoint of it's not typical for corporations to necessarily want to air their dirty laundry or the 10 times that it didn't work before the time that it did work. I think there's probably a little risk from that perspective. Let's talk a little bit about the logistics. In a big corporation, oftentimes you're working on your existing business model, and that. And all your resources, all your people, all your metrics and that are driven around maximizing and making that existing business model go. What's some of the key things that you've learned about how you can actually innovate within the company, change that mindset or move things forward differently? 

Kaihan Krippendorff: There are a whole bunch of things like summarize into seven, but if I were to summarize them all, the one thing, it is to think of yourself. If you're innovating from within as pushing a B to B to C innovation. In other words, seeing your company as a customer and not being frustrated when your customer rejects your innovation, but just as you would as an entrepreneur, you know that customer centricity that you talk about that customer centric design. See the business as a customer? Try to understand what is it about this innovation that they are not thrilled about and then re-engineer the innovation. 

Brian Ardinger: Do you see B to C types of companies being more innovative because they have maybe more of that direct customer feedback and focus, I suppose, compared to B to B companies out there. Is this happening across different industries and that.

Kaihan Krippendorff: Definitely it’s happening across industries. I looked at 367 companies that have appeared on most innovative lists in the last five years. And I looked at which one of these innovators are really outperforming their competition. And I found that there are only 13 that do. Yeah. Most of them are actually B to B companies, MasterCard, Alibaba. Amazon is a B to C company, but they're very much a B to B company like on a platform. So definitely your point of having that customer centric view, having the voice of the customer there and really ensuring that employees are in touch with the customer and market. That is it. A very important factor.

Brian Ardinger: You've been in this space for a while. You've both consulting and working directly with corporations in this. What has changed over the years that's made it easier or more willing for companies to take an innovative approach to changing the way they do business? 

Kaihan Krippendorff: Two things. One is removing from a focus on competition. In the 1980s you have Michael Porter. We shifted towards a focus on the customer with Amazon and all the client-customer orientation that they inspire. I think were shifting now towards a focus on the employee, and increasingly we see successful companies saying, really the employees are customers. What we are is a platform that helps create great work for employees. Starbucks, for example, they view their primary customer as the employee that's working in the store. And so there is this paradigm shift and that's driven in part by the pace of change. It's accelerating and by the time new signals make it up to the top of the hierarchy a decision is made and it gets pushed back down, it takes too long. Companies are really recognizing that the key to surviving this fast paced, agile, digital world is to push innovation outward to employees and liberate them to innovate.

Brian Ardinger: We've seen this rise of startups and the rise of brand-new companies that are using some of the same methodologies now that are now being deployed and used within organizations. What are some of the core differences between startups and corporates and how they're using these methodologies?

Kaihan Krippendorff: Did you see a lot of these agile and business model canvasing methodologies being adopted inside large corporations, and these are strategic tools and concepts that corporations have been slower to adapt. For example, if you use the business model canvas, which many entrepreneurs are well familiar with, but I've found that executives in established companies are l...