In 2009, a well known carbonated drinks company posted an open call for ideas on how to manipulate the size of bubbles in soft beverages. Posting anonymously on an innovation platform, the company shared its belief that changing the size, shape, and texture of bubbles would distinguish its products from competitors and make the company a market leader. 8, 000 miles away in India, Manish Pandey was working on a PhD in metallurgical engineering.
Having spent three and a half years in the steel industry, Manish Had developed a knowledge of metallic foams and the physics of foaming in metals. The challenge piqued his interest and Manish went about, proposing a method to manipulate the characteristics of bubbles based on his knowledge. His idea turned out to be a winner, and Manish bagged 15, 000 in cash. Imagine that for every problem that a company has failed to solve, It can find someone like Manish.
Although it's well known that ideas feed off one another and innovation thrives when multiple haunches combine, organizations do the opposite to letting this happen. Instead of allowing ideas to enrich one another, they make their innovation departments lock boxes for ideas and exclude participation of people within and outside their organizations who might have a solution to important problems. There is another way.
We are joined by the precise person who can tell us everything about that way we are joined by a passionate believer in the potential of people aided by technology to drive innovation at scale. He's the author of "one smart crowd", which will cover in the future episode of the innovation show. He's the founder and ceo of the sponsor of this series Wazoku proudly a b corp. , Simon Hill, you're very welcome to the show.
Great to be here, Aiden. Thank you.
It's great to have you on the show. Finally, man, we've been planning this for quite some time, and I'm very grateful for your sponsorship of the Corporate Explorer series as well. One of the things I wanted to jump straight into is , to bring our audience up to speed where we are in the Corporate Explorer series.
We've spoken to B. Schofield, your former colleague, and indeed Stuart Laws, who used Wazuku, about challenge driven innovation, and B. gave us a step by step guide how to implement CDI, while Stuart shared how to use it in the military. But I thought we'd get into the nitty gritty with some of your great examples. The nuts and bolts of how companies can even implement software like Wazoku offers. And I'd love you to share what you're seeing out there.
What are the biggest challenges companies are facing, what they're coming to you for, and what innovation is really like out there.
Start with a small question then, eh? Good. It's a great question. And I, I actually I had a meeting this morning with one of our large clients in financial services where I was presenting and discussing this exact topic, because I think that we're actually at a paradigm shift moment in terms of the broad topic of innovation driven both by What technology is increasingly capable of, particularly around automation and enablement.
What that drives in terms of a prerequisite about data and where our data resides and what that data Looks like and how it is utilized and then also a shifting macro that's driving a focus back round again on efficiency and productivity and Some can argue that might be the perfect storm but those innovation teams that are currently feeling the pinch and they're shrinking down and And having to work out how to do more with less or perhaps even not
even being there anymore You We're also part of that constant hokey cokey dance, right, of, of centralized or decentralized innovation and what does that look like? And I think that paradigm moment is actually, is actually really right there, right?
It's trying to figure out what's What does the innovation mandates and innovation function, if there is one in an organization, need to look like in the future, and how can we shape for that whilst baking the tools that I'm not going to refer to as innovation, actually, I'm going to talk about crowdsourcing and collective intelligence this concept that I talk about quite often as connected collective intelligence, which is machine plus human coming together to drive more
impactful outcomes as we go forward. That shift is really accelerating from a, from an organizational perspective, and will continue to do so apace, right? Which is, which is causing a whole load of questions and a whole load of opportunities for organizations.
Tell us the AI thing, because you've really hit on something that's a challenge for people. Like any new technology, people initially resist it. And one of the things we've often talked about off air is the fact that an organization really needs to have its vision in place, its strategy in place, its hunting zones in place that we've talked about previously in the series. In order then to implement a software and if they implement the software too early, they won't use it.
And then they might reject it later on. This is something that you've seen from day one with your tools.
as happens when , we hit these moments, right? These paradigm moments. And I think that, that it isn't about AI necessarily, this paradigm moment. I think there's a, there's an important wave there.
Yeah. That that aligns to the macro as I've just spoken about, is there is a very big opportunity that sits in front of us to shift away from the concepts of ideas and, and just looking for ideas, whether they're in our hunting zones or not, to really connect the disparate and different bits of those insights and intel to figure out where the right opportunities exist and often where those right opportunities exist are in
the processes and in the kinks rather than the bends or rather than the trends. Maybe it's another way of thinking about it, right? It's like, I was talking to someone last week. He gave this interesting phrase of a trend is only a trend into the bends, right? And that really, you've got to try and figure out where the bends are going to be as you move forward. Where are the bends and where are the trends in AI and what do they mean from an organizational perspective?
Is your hunting zone concepts, right? It's like applied to your organizational strategy, which is your context locally applied to your skills and capabilities. And as we look at those skills and capabilities, crowdsourcing comes right to the fore because.
It's well publicized what the skills gap is looking like inside organizations today, what the skills gap is going to look like in the future, and what the changing nature of workers, jobs, innovation, and other things become more taskified in the way that we approach them. It lends itself very nicely to this open talent crowdsourced approach where, , managers manage and leaders lead and work is done in a more taskified, more crowdsourced way as we go forward.
Whatever that looks like, aided of course by technology, right? I think there's a huge wave of intelligence off of automation that will come forward. There's a A nice shift in terms of the tactile nature of what AI is like. We've had it for 20 odd years, but it's not been very tactile and it's become more tactile 'cause we can talk to it and we can experience it.
And so there's a shift, but there's a long, there's a long way to go and it's all gonna be tied back to, what are we trying to do as a business?
I was in the gym this morning and I know the owner of this gym that I go to, and I said how There hasn't been anybody in the gym pretty much in February and March and now it's starting to fill up again because the summer is coming and, I equipped him. I suppose you don't care as long as they're paying their monthly fee. And he goes.
Au contraire,, he says, I care a lot because I need them to be using the gym in order to maintain their membership and then to re subscribe their membership in the future. That was this morning. I thought about, well, that's similar to a software like you actually want the organization not to be engaged in innovation theater. You want them to be using the software and the enterprise solution that you offer.
But you actually want the culture to be in such a good spot that they'll use it and use it correctly as well. This is a challenge that you see all the time and you have to subtly advise the organization, maybe on their culture and what needs to be in place before they can implement a software. I'd love you to share that with our audience.
Yeah. It also shows you've been in the gym every day and to know there was no one there, but we expect that of you the I, again, this is a multilayered question, right? But I, my belief squarely is that whilst there may be an innovation function, that the, the tools of innovation need to be deployed and are in many cases already being deployed by many different people across the organization who don't even think that they're doing innovation.
And as a result of that, which, which we can blend into culture and say, do we have a culture of or not? Right. And I think that there's great disciplines, there's stuff in the book about it, there's lots that's written about it and I buy into it at a point, but my, my real argument is we've got to remove the friction from the job to be done by the person who's already got the job and not necessarily try and create new jobs for new people in organizations or new jobs for those people, right?
This is the tools of innovation are how can I help you achieve the outcome that I'm asking you to achieve best as an organization, right? How do I remove friction? How do I give you the permission?
Sure, all those things are valid But it isn't by putting another team in or another set of tooling in that creates more jobs It's supposed to make your job easier, and more facilitated And so part of that is trying to consolidate The number of tools the number of processes the number of things that we have you're being asked to do Because everywhere across our organizations and beyond we duplicate those things, right?
You And I believe that fundamentally the answers lay out there to the right questions, but often we don't ask the right questions and therefore we don't get the right answers. But those, those answers are pretty easy to find if you can identify the right question as well. That sort of classically attributed Einstein quote, which we'll have to parrot again now of like, give me an hour, I'll spend most of it, whatever, 50 odd minutes framing the problem and a few minutes solving it.
It's true and kind of cliche at the same time, but I think it's fundamentally about trying to pull all of this together in one single place. Right. And so, I'm bound to say that because that's the strategy that I spent over a decade building towards and underpinning, but also studying and really looking at it.
. And what is the job of a. Innovation team in an organization, I fundamentally believe that is, is about enablement and empowerment and, and, and creating that freedom and that space and the tooling and the governance to let the organization writ large, do the job that it's going to do with the tools of innovation, helping it to do it at scale more effectively. And it's partly a vocation, partly a skill. Mostly it's a mindset and a capability that should just be.
Intrinsic to life because I think it is right you step outside the workplace and people are really good at this stuff You step into the workplace and suddenly they get blinkered and are not able to think in the same way. But I think a lot of it's an incentives and a structuring thing. I don't know if that's cultural or not. , I'm not an innovation culture person or expert per se. It's part of it, I think, but I think it's an output rather than input.
I agree with you, man. What I realized was when I worked in innovation in industry, in the real world, not as an academic or not outside as a consultant, I think that scar tissue of understanding actually what gets in the way is so, so valuable. And that's why, Steve jobs would say, for example, don't hire consultants who have never worked in the industry before.
Cause , you couldn't come up with the perfect solutions that are on implementable. And one of the things I noticed was that the role of a head of innovation is more like an orchestrator or as you call it an enabler. It's also education.
It's also letting people know that actually they have the solutions and being able to enable them and empower them to go yeah you're your ideas count and this is why i love the corporate explorer book copy there behind me on the shelf by the way i have a copy of programs for those who sign up for a sub stack in the book. Talking about step by step, what you need to do, including the hunting zones element so people know even where to suggest the idea, how to suggest the idea.
And one of the things we talked about before we came on air was. If I'm somebody with inside the organization and I'm a great ideation person, I come up with great ideas, great solutions. Often I don't even know who to tell that solution to. And I think that's one of the biggest shames that you have in innovation because you have often the solutions with inside the company and no way to let them bubble up to the top of the organization, to the people who are making the strategy.
And I'd love you to maybe to share Your perspective on that and what people can do with inside organizations to enable that. Yeah, sure. And I think it's inside and outside as well, just to, just to really bring that sort of connected collective piece together, because the data. The data inside needs to be melded with the data outside as you go forward. The example you gave in the in the intro there of Manish. Is a classic example of what I'm talking about, right?
Monish didn't work for a company that didn't, certainly didn't work for the company that was, that was looking for, to solve that, that problem or their opportunity in that space was privy to a fraction of the information that the others inside the business would have had, but it was not constrained by the organization in any way, shape or form. Interestingly, because of the way that program works as well, they'd have had no idea who Monish was, right? It's all done anonymously.
So you judge ideas purely on their merits. directly against a well framed brief, right? And so you're going to think about that problem statement, as I said, and bring it in. And it does teach you quite a lot, right? Like there's a lot of, I've got thousands and thousands of examples of businesses worrying about, about only being able to release a fraction of the data that subject matter experts have pawned over for months and years and not been able to find a solution for.
And how the hell is a, a quote, random person with a fraction of that data going to do anything impactful with it and time and time and time and time again, they do. Right in really complex areas and sometimes in really simple areas because we we're very solution oriented as a species, but also we're very, we're very prone to focusing our driving our focus into a very specific area unintentionally, right?
It's very, very deeply entrenched in the way that we've been educated and how we think and how we behave. Right? And so taking that humor, heuristic approach and trying to just broaden out our lens just very slightly. Or in the case of something like our Wazoku crowd proposition globally and on an anonymized basis brings in stuff that's just out of view, right?
And to your point earlier around how do you capture and uncover these things, it's about affording a place to put them at the time that you have that spark of inspiration, knowing whether there's a need for it right now or not in the organization. And this is stuff that, intelligent automation, call that AI, if you will, can do, right? We have a, we have a trained natural language We think of her as a person.
She's called Jen. She's not really, but she is in the, in the platform whose job is to be like the outsourced innovation coordinator and like manager or whatever. And it's looking to help you in all kinds of different ways. Cause it's not just about ideas, right? It's about.
The startups that you meet, the university research programs that you were doing and that you did 10 years ago, that most of the people have left the business and forgotten about now, but carry buckets and buckets of information that could be useful to the business that will never be discovered in SharePoint. So the startup will never be found in a Salesforce CRM or anything because they just can't. Right. And so how do you match that, that problem and solution?
Data sets effectively at the point that you need to use it is a very complex thing because we've lived in that data set for over a decade.
We can train machines to be smart and capable and make it easy for end users to put sparks of inspiration as they come to root them and analyze them and figure out whether they fit a strategic need today, or they fit a trend or they feed a trend that could become a strategic need tomorrow, or just house it until the point in time in the future when it is needed. Is critical, right? So that you're never really starting from zero other than the first day you roll my platform out, right?
And that's really key to everything that we do is creating a circularity , and a democratization to ideas in their very broadest sense, , within an ecosystem. And I choose that word ecosystem quite importantly, because there are some problems that are very, they pertain to intellectual property. They pertain to competitive differentiation. There's also a big bundle of that pyramid down here that do not, they're shared industrial problems.
It's far better to think about how we might pool our resources. In our sector to drive more impactful outcomes than are necessarily going to be driven by the fact that there's too many of them. We haven't got enough dollar or resource to be able to put towards them. And so we're also enabling that ecosystems to come together and work on shared problems.
Doing a lot of this in the offshore wind space at the moment, where there's millions of different shared problems across the sector that dollars can be pulled into and innovation can be stimulated that is not competitively differentiating, but it's foundational to moving that sector forward in terms of what can be competitively differentiated in the future.
I'd love to share a couple examples. I thought I wrote this article this week and I call it the perils of we've tried that before and it didn't work. That happens to many people inside organizations. And I was thinking about it more deeply in the sense of.
If your work force is transient as in you have the best of somebody for less and less time than you had before so you don't have this company man or woman before that would in the organization for a very long time and they're there for three to five years their ideas often leave with them and by the time they come up with the idea.
They might be on the way out, or they might want to own that idea inside the organization and not be able to propagate it and get frustrated and leave, or the idea might be a cannibalization idea, and they might be shown the door, in a gentle way, because they don't want that idea being brought around the organization. But I thought about how, if you had this resource to capture those ideas.
Like you say, you're not starting from zero, but it also might be a case of timing, Mike Crotelli, the former CEO of Pitney Bowes was on the show last week. He talked about this, that he persisted on some ideas because he knew.
The timing might be right at a different time and i thought about that's a great shame and the only reason that worked was cause he was ceo and he persisted and he gave himself the time to be able to persist but you have so many people with inside an organization and outside that can come up with ideas that just might be too early and then the moore's law kicks in exponential change kicks in ai for example is more tactile we can use it. And now the timing's right because the environment's right.
The ecosystem's right. , that is one of the things I think a tool like this can offer. And maybe you might share, some examples where you're seeing this thrive.
I think that also on that, like there's. There's this concept of, of clustering, right? So, an idea is, is an idea and that part of, part of the job that we're always looking to do is to limit the duplication of ideas and to bring them, bring people together to, to work around an idea. But there's the human nature of no matter how similar your idea, you and I could have the same idea. There's a part of our vanity will mean that mine's different than yours.
And I don't want to, I'm not giving you the credit. I'm going to do it myself. Right. And so really the, the, the, the augmentation of this is around clustering and trends, right? And so trying to figure out where the heartbeat is. Of the stuff that is going on. The AI phenomenon is a really good one of that, right? Like think of all the firesights and innovation teams inside these large organizations. I'd posit that most of them were caught by surprise in November, 2022.
. And the release of open AI is chat GPT, which, it's got a decent number of months behind it now. And. Whilst it's moved on from a technology perspective, the user experience, that tactile thing we spoke about caused a funk and a panic, right? At an interesting time of, what have we missed? What have we not missed? Where are we? And all of these foresight.
But actually, from a data perspective, I can tell you that I saw ideas that were in the past being, being clustered with new things were coming in new startups that were being entered into platforms that showed me just before that time, that there's something was something interesting was moving, and that really spiked thereafter from an organizational perspective.
And I can tell you where those thematics lay are broadly about where the direction of travel is now in the organization, , in terms of The focus of what intelligent automation AI will be, but there's hundreds of those data points that if you've got the pulse of your organization and you've got the, the sense of the types of startups that are applying to your accelerators or your CVCs, and you've got your strategic foresight team aligned to those things, and you can listen to
your customers and get their feedback and their feedback is about things that are related to automation and other things. And, and you understand the strategy of the business. You can suddenly start to coalesce a data set with a heartbeat at it, right? There's this concept of things being trends, but being dormant trends being more active trends and et cetera, et cetera, that starts to bring that to life a little bit, right?
Back to this transient workforce piece that you mentioned as well, just to, just to jump in on that. I, I, I don't think the data is going to run in that direction. I think there's always been a group of people that will come and work places, and there's been a group of people that will work there. I wasn't very good at staying very long, unless it was my own firm, right? And there are people like me that will always been out there. I think this shift of open talent and the taskification of work
is an interesting one, and . It isn't going to work for everybody. It's not going to be a wholesale shift of the workforce. It is a wholesale shift for how jobs are done, though, right? How do you get work performed in a different way, which requires a different organizational structure and an open mindset and a willingness to adopt different things, right? And that. It's much more of a mindset and a capability thing than this wholesale shift to the way that people think about jobs.
Yes, it opens up another opportunity. As you get there, that that piece to open up to the crowd is really good evidence of that, right? We spoke about a few on the way in, but all of these on like, like, This stat that kind of blows my mind on the crowd is that 80 percent of, of, of solvers, we call them that the people that solve these challenges don't have the resume that would have meant you would have hired them to solve this challenge. Right.
And so it's the unlikely people that you don't look like subject matter experts that are fascinated by this problem in some way, shape, or form. They were prepared to work on it on their own dime in their own time. I either got no guarantee of making any money out of pure intellectual curiosity. I want to have impact and drive things. That's down to core human nature.
And yes, there might be an opportunity to get paid or to collaborate with this organization in the future, but it's not a time and materials thing. They're doing it because they're fascinated and interested in the topic. That tells you something quite interesting about human nature.
That's the book that I, that I dug into right from my side was to dig into the, the human motivations and the heuristics that sit behind some of these things to understand why, why does so many hundreds of thousands of people do this? You know play this game to a degree right and get involved in it in the way that they do And what can that teach us about organizational culture and the way that we should think about work and things going forward as well
And. We'll talk about one smart crowd in the future, that's a future book on the show, but also open talent your friend and future guest, John Windsor's new book, we're going to talk about that in the future, new HBO or a book that's just been released, but let's, leave our audience with a killer example. Something that you've seen a story you love telling that you're allowed to tell. You might have to anonymize the company, et cetera, but let's give an example of how this can play out.
Because an organization can really get their heads around. Okay. Apart from empowering my own organization. Getting ideas from outside the company, from the connected, collected audience. How does this translate into revenue for me? Cause ultimately that's what everybody wants at the end of the day.
Yeah and the beauty of it is mostly you can talk about it Sometimes I have to hide the company because it's open I can talk about it, right? And I would say and i'll give you a very specific example, but It is very unlikely because we've run thousands and thousands of these now that if you're, an organization that's facing a problem that might be, I don't know where to focus, right? It might be. I don't haven't quite nailed my hypothesis yet.
I just want to do some broad crowd based research all the way through to, I could just solve this one little thing. , it would be game changing for us as an organization, right? We often ask customers, give us the 10 things you wish you could solve that would transform it. We won't be able to solve all of them, but the crowd is pretty damn powerful, right? And impactful in doing those things. One example of that type of problem was a potato chip company came to us.
this company famous for having tubes of stacked crisps if you like, right? And it was very important to them that these things were not broken in manufacturing. And so they were looking for a way of shaking the fats off of these chips without breaking them, right? And everything they tried resulted in too much breakage.
And people really like this nice tower of these crisps, and , they tried and they got all these subject matter experts, different forms of shaking, different vibration types, , and just couldn't. So we ran the challenge We reframed it a little bit to think about viscosity rather than, oil on potato chips with viscosity on a fragile surface. And through this thing out and hundreds of different people from around the world got involved in this.
The winning solution back to my unlikely sources came from a violinist who was a part of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Who had the idea, which she assumed would already have been had, but hadn't to use sound waves, right? And she's like, the frequency of the oil will be different than the frequency , of the crisp. And so find the natural frequency and it'll shake the oil off. You don't need to worry about it. And it won't break the chip.
And obviously they took that, they tried it, it worked. And that became a part of the process. And so looking at unlikely sources of quite obvious information sometimes, right? And I've got hundreds of examples of this, right? People that didn't, just didn't step back and think about it in a slightly different way. And then you're sort of like, this. And so a brilliant story, one for the time, and there's loads like that.
Much as there is the sort of Manish Pandey's, which is just going to find the expert who's researching it, but you'd probably never be able to hire that person as well and everything in between.
Beautiful man. I absolutely love that story. Last thing for you is rather than me doing the usual Wazoku sponsors the corporate explorer let me ask you as the founder of the company as somebody who's been driving this and is passionate about it for the last decade what does Wazoku do and what where can you find , Simon Hill: what I'm going to say is, imagine a world where every voice is heard, where every spark of creativity contributes to the greater good.
And that's the world that Wazoku envisions. We use AI powered technology to help companies to scout the best ideas, the best startups. And to connect those through to the strategic priorities of your organization, using the tools of collective connected intelligence. You can find me in all the usual places. It was oku. com. Check out our open call challenges. It was oku crowd. com as well. Those are just a good way of seeing the type of stuff that we do. They're public.
Anyone can register and participate. And there's often tens of thousands, if not more than that, of dollars up for grabs for people that can solve these things. Companies out there that use this as a way of driving R and D opportunities or, or sales opportunities in from a product development perspective as well, or just find me on social. I'm , always with an opinion on that. And thanks Aiden.
Founder and CEO of Wazoku, Simon Hill. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you.