Ep. 214 - Stephen Shapiro, Author of Invisible Solutions on Reframing & Solving Business Problems

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stephen Shapiro. Steve is the author of a new book called Invisible Solutions. He spent a number of decades speaking and writing and working with corporations all around the idea of innovation. And how companies can reframe and relook at problems to get better results. 

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 Insideoutside.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 to 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 we have Stephen Shapiro. Stephen is a innovation instigator, hall of fame speaker, author of six books including the most recent one that I wanted to have him on the show to talk about called Invisible Solutions. So Stephen, welcome to show. 

Stephen Shapiro: Hey Brian. Great to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. Actually, we got connected, I was interviewing Thomas Wedellsborg a few weeks ago about his new book, and we serendipitously started talking about an example that you talk about all the time. This idea of how do you reframe problems. And we want to start there and give a little bit of background on how you got into this innovation space. 

Stephen Shapiro: Sure. So, I started off life and I guess I still am a bit of a nerd. I loved math and physics and all that stuff. Growing up, I was in the math club, went to college, majored as an engineer, left university, went to work for Accenture, and I was doing a lot of engineering work. And in fact, in the early nineties, I was actually involved with something called Business Process Reengineering, which was basically efficiency work. We would optimize businesses. And one day discovered that the more we optimize the company's processes, the more they would downsize the workforce. And I had just had this existential meltdown in. And took a leave of absence, reinvented myself. And in 1995, 1996 timeframe, I decided to focus on growth and innovation. Wasn't a hot topic that far back, but that's what I put my hat on and I've been loving it ever since. That's all I've been doing for 25 years.

Brian Ardinger: You've had the great opportunity to see the evolution of innovation specifically in a corporate environment and how companies look at innovation, how they treat it, how they execute on it. What are some of the things that you are seeing that people are getting wrong about innovation? 

Stephen Shapiro: Well, it's been interesting, like you said, having been in for 25 years, I've seen the evolution. It started off as basically R & D. And then it started sort of in the early 2000s, 2003, 2004, it started to gain some traction in terms of it being a companywide, an enterprise wide endeavor, rather than just sort of this little group. But I think the thing which I've seen most organizations get wrong is they collapse innovation with creativity. And they believe that quantity of ideas will drive value for the organization. And from my experience, you might get there eventually, but it's an extremely expensive and slow way to go about it. So that to me is the biggest mistake is a focus on ideas and quantity rather than focus on questions, opportunities, and solutions that drive the greatest level of value. 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that's an interesting topic because you talk to corporations that are spinning up innovation labs, and they're putting maybe 5 or 10 ideas in a year, hoping that one of those five or 10 will end up being Uber or whatever the next thing is. And not realizing that like the startup ecosystem alone is putting out thousands of these types of ideas and Uber or Twitter or whatever it comes out of those thousands of ideas. And it's very hard for any one organization to have that lead flow or deal flow in such a way to have enough of that throughput really to make that happen. If it's not about ideas or if it's not just about ideas, you know, you have to have the idea and you execute on it. What are some of the things that corporations should be thinking about when they start about thinking about innovation? 

Stephen Shapiro: It comes down to, instead of focusing on the solution, it's focusing on the question. And the thing that I found is paradoxically, the more we try to focus on the end game, the goal, the, the solution, the less likely we are to find good ones. And so what I always tell my clients to do is anytime they're chasing ideas, chasing opportunities, just push the pause button for a moment. Just say, what are we really trying to achieve here? What's the problem we're trying to solve. What's the opportunity that we're trying to take advantage of. And is there a better way to ask the question that will get us a completely different result? 

Sometimes it's that simple, but it's recognizing that having the answers isn't the answer. It really is about the question. The problem, I think a lot of times as leaders feel like they have to have the answers and I think that's actually not good leadership. A good leader is somebody who asks questions, which gets the rest of the organization to ask better questions. And when you have an organization, that's actually thinking about it from the perspective of what creates the greatest value. And is there a different way we can do it. We now get more much greater throughput than we would otherwise. 

Brian Ardinger: And that whole fear of failure. It makes sense from the standpoint of corporations and organizations that have figured out a business model that works, you know, the idea of killing that business model or failing at that business model is quite scary. But yet if you're going to create something new that is uncertain, and unknowable have to go through some failures to figure out that and navigate that particular process. 

Stephen Shapiro: Yeah. And here's an interesting, I just want to build on something you said earlier, is I'm not sure that large corporations should be doing a lot of radical innovation. Because if you think about the way markets work, I mean, we will talk about an Uber or Lyft as sort of this breakthrough innovation, but the reality is if you think about the number of companies, small startup companies that are trying new business models and new technologies and fail. The success rate is extremely small. So, to assume that a company is going to have a high likelihood of success is a high level of egotism in some respects. 

If you focus on what the real opportunity is, then you can put a separation between the opportunity and the solution. And it doesn't mean you as an organization need to find the solution. It doesn't even mean you need to invest in developing it. You could use open innovation and crowdsourcing to buy a solution elsewhere. You could do tech scouting. You could partner, you could buy another company, you can license technology from another company. But when you put that pause between the opportunity, question, challenge, whatever you want to call it and the solution, ...