Dave Crawley on Innovation Thinking

Highlights from the Conversation

Welcome to Supply Chain Next. I’m super pumped to wind up the year with my new friend and colleague, David Crawley from the University of Houston. Hey, David.

• Hey, Richard.

You’ve got such an interesting background and history. I wanted to start with an introduction to who you are, what you’re doing, and how you got to where you are today.

• Well, thank you, Richard. It’s a pleasure to be of service to you and your audience.
• I can describe myself in one sentence: I’m a man of purpose and compassion who believes in the integrity of great work, and my purpose is that I’m a catalyst for something greater than today.

I love that! Short and succinct. But that type of insight and clarity didn’t happen just this morning, that came through years of development experiences, and you didn’t have a traditional path to where you are today. So I’d love to walk all the way back to how you got into consumer marketing, branding, and how you ended up in Moscow.

• I’ve been fortunate to stumble forward through my life unconventionally. In many instances I’ve been blessed beyond my imagination.
• I was homeless as a teenager, and I came from a broken home. I realized that the only way I was going to find my way out of the situations of my life and prosper was to get a degree.
• During that time, they didn’t have a lot of computerized oversight into everything. And so I was able to go to the University of Kansas by walking up to the admissions, pay my fee, get my student ID and pick up my classes. And then I just worked my way through.
• I lived in an abandoned house for several years in a porch room with the vision of the kind of person I wanted to be, or certainly the kind of career I wanted, which at that stage was to become an international advertising and marketing executive.
• I’m dyslexic, ADHD, but that was undiagnosed at the time. So I really didn’t start discovering that until much later.

Sorry to interrupt, but was this the ’70s timeframe?

• It was the ’70s. So, as you can imagine, I had hair down to my shoulders and I’m not entirely proud of it but I was a stoner. It was crazy, but it was a great way for me to escape my situation of having to grind it out by living on $125 a month.
• I was fortunate that the owners of the abandoned house I was living in didn’t charge me rent for a year and a half.
• I graduated from the psychology program with $150 in my pocket and I bought a one-way ticket to Dallas, and ended up sleeping on a friend’s couch until he got tired of me. It was really difficult for him to date girls with me there in the living room.
• Fast forward: I wanted to get involved in advertising because I love the dynamics of creativity. I love the aspect of how creativity can be deployed as a purpose with the intent to motivate people to action. And every situation that you engage in with your clients in advertising is something new that hasn’t been done before.
• Everything in my life was created moving forward, not necessarily in the best manner—there’s many situations I would certainly change. But a life without regret is like a library of unread books.

So can I jump in for a second? David I think it’s so fascinating—I don’t know if you’ve thought about whether there’s a connection between your pursuit of marketing and, as you describe it, the ability to sort of catalyze change. There’s something about that choice of marketing, given your background, and what you came out of, versus, say, finance.

• Yeah, there was. I really liked the idea of PR, but I couldn’t write. I’m a horrible writer. But I make my life writing now; so I figured it out. Actually, my mentor figured it out for me and dragged me through it kicking and screaming.
• So I clawed my way into the advertising agency industry, because I just wouldn’t give up. I mean, if I gave up then I’d prove everybody right who told me I wasn’t good enough. And I got that a lot.
• I found a great mentor. He was everything I wanted to be: he was sophisticated, he had a phenomenal command of language. He could sit there and talk to a CEO, or an ambassador, and yet have a different conversation with the guy in the warehouse. He was a phenomenal presenter.
• After about four months, one day he looked at me—and I was worried because I didn’t graduate until the age of 26. So at the age of 28, he looked at me, and he said, “You know, it’s phenomenal. I’ve never known anybody with such passion to succeed. But your skill set is where somebody at the age of 22 or 23 is. Normally, I’d fire you. But because of this passion, I will teach you everything I know on the condition that you will do everything I tell you to do, no matter how hard it is for you to do it. You must also promise that you will teach other people what I’m teaching you, and you will teach it to others unconditionally.”
• And I did. For the next four years, it was really nuts. For example, I had to go to night school to learn grammar all over again. He gave me tickets to the opera, and I’d have to come back and give a presentation for 15 minutes about who I sat next to, what we did, and what the play was about. He would take me to lunch and I would have to create stories for everybody that was in the restaurant, what they were talking about, who was in control, and all these things. Phenomenal. He’d have me come up with a word a day and use it ten times. We did that for a year and a half to force me to increase my vocabulary.
• After four and a half, almost five years, I moved on to larger advertising agencies. And I just kept focusing on the things that I was taught and the fundamentals, but understanding that everything is new.
• I wrote my own proposals, and I wrote my own ads if needed, although these were very large ad agencies.
• I worked with Pepsi in the field. Being in the field, I saw the granular activities of the movement of the product on the shelf, and developed programs with that specific intent. So it was very granular, in that engagement, and doing merchandising using media to provoke distribution of goods through these channels, and there were many different channels that Pepsi was involved in.
• You know, people think Pepsi is in the business of selling soft drinks, and they’re not. They’re selling syrup, and the bottlers are in the business of selling soft drinks to distributors—not to the end consumer.
• But they build with the pull strategy accordingly, and so the ecosystem of that had to be managed and had to be touched on and had to have a certain degree of logic modeling, where parts are seamlessly connected. And I saw that from the field.
• I would get in my car, and drive to a grocery store and look around, drive to a theme park, to a restaurant, to all these different venues, even the vending machines. And I would see where they were placed, how they competed.
• We would compete in schools, and many times we would go to schools to bid against Coca Cola just to push Coca Cola to spend more money than they intended for that contract. That left us money to spend on the schools that we really wanted to get. We burned up Coke’s budget— things like that.
• If you do really great work on little things, you’re given opportunities to do bigger things. That was one of the dynamics that I was taught, and I just kept deploying it, and I probably put in 12 hours a day, six days a week.
• One of the things that was evident during that time is that you can taste great work. It tastes like metal. You have to work twice as hard for that last mile of the development of your idea, because advertising is all about ideas and the execution thereof.
• You can get something done that’s “good enough”. But nobody really pays money for “good enough”. Opportunities generally don’t come to those who just do “good enough”. So you put in that extra bit, because it’s where you want to go from where you’re at.
• Eventually that led me to Houston, and I maintained my relationship with Pepsi, developing programs and sports marketing, cross referencing with Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and the other properties of PepsiCo, and Frito Lay in particular, blending these dynamics.
• When you’re doing a program with multiple entities, they’re like different degrees of an equation: three dimensions, four dimensions, because you have to blend all their requirements, and the things that they want.
• If you’re able to do that, it’s like plywood. You have to have a cause and a purpose, and each one of those pieces of the plywood has grains that go in different directions but they’re unified; all these programs without any one organization overshadowing the other. But the strength of all this coming together benefits everybody anyway by circumstance: that was a key discovery of building these programs.
• Then I had an opportunity from Mexico; I was asked to develop promotional marketing programs for northern Mexico out of Monterey, and co-manage the manufacture of the Mirinda soft drink, which was the number two soft drink of PepsiCo at the time for import into the valley here in Texas.
• Then I did package design for the island of Cypress and developed competitive adversarial marketing programs against the organized distributors in Italy—take that any way you want.
• Then I co-wrote the business plan for introducing product in Austria, and then they asked me to go to Russia to launch Frito Lay. It was kind of an interesting call, they said, “Would you be willing to come to Moscow?” And I said yeah, I’d love to.

This was in the mid to late ’90s, correct?

• Yes, two years after the attempted coup d’etat.

So there was quite a bit of uncertainty going to Moscow at that time, and fractionalization and just the geopolitical environment.

• To me, that was normal. When you live an unconventional childhood, and have come through the vestiges of a misspent youth, you think, well, that’s just the way it is.

Well, that’s the way it is for you! But for people listening, and I bet even your students, you’ve got to put that in a historical context. I’ve got to point out that when you were asked to go to Moscow, that was at a time right when the Cold War was on its backside, with Russia almost in a retreating mode. Putin was just kind of coming out of this chaos to emerge as the victor.

• Well, yeah, Putin at the time was mayor of St. Petersburg, and Yeltsin was the president who stopped the coup d’etat.
• Is the cold war ever really over? That’s a debate we can have. But yeah, it was the Wild West, you know, kidnapping, death threats—that’s just the way it was there—it’s negotiating tactics.
• So they gave me the offer and I took it. Because when opportunity knocks and the door is open, you really don’t have a long time to ruminate on it. You’re either prepared for it, or you’re committed to being prepared for it, and you step through into the unknown and work it out.
• I’d been married for a while, and had a one year-old son. I went home that night, and I said, “Honey, I decided to go work for PepsiCo,” and she said, “Oh, that’s great, what are you going to do?” And I said, “I’m going to launch Frito Lay in Russia.” She said, “That’s fantastic. When are you going to do that?” And I said, “On Friday,” which was a day and a half from that day, and that didn’t go over well at all.
• They wired me some clothes because it was 20 degrees below zero and living in Houston I didn’t have that kind of winter clothes.
• And so I moved to Moscow. My wife’s British, and she would periodically go and visit her mother with our son, and I would come back, but it was really tough on everybody.
• I became deputy CEO of Moscow operations with Y&R, the world’s largest advertising agency. I had developed an expertise in creating markets, or rather recognizing an emerging market and capitalizing on it—and once again, relate that back to a kid who was living in a 10’ by 13’ room and wondering what his future was going to be. I just took the instincts from that and built on it.
• Then they wanted me to open up offices in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan, and my wife just said, “You’re nuts, you have a choice to make”.
• So I quit that and came back home and rebooted my life. And in the process I got involved in startups, then became a subject matter expert in population-based computing, and traveled the world with Hewlett Packard, helping to develop markets and building business solutions, which you could call the cloud today, and shareware and things of that nature.
• A big part of that activity involved the distribution of information across the value chain of processes and operations. As you know, there’s a unity in the operational flow that has to sync up.
• The value chain dynamic is relatively the same—with various nuances, mind you, per geographical area—but those nuances are traditionally unique to the culture as opposed to the fundamentals. In everything, you should have a sense of what the fundamentals are, and what are the influencing factors.
• My son has learning disabilities and my wife and I decided that we would homeschool our son. His disabilities are significant, but he has an IQ of 146. So I quit everything and worked out of the house.
• I worked with some people I knew who started a security and intelligence firm. It was founded by Jim Bernazzani, the former deputy director of the CIA for law enforcement and retired special agent in charge of New Orleans. I was the analyst; I did corporate intelligence related back to how PepsiCo competed with everybody.
• In creating markets, you always had to understand the players. It’s not always what you know, it’s what they know.
• I decided to get an advanced degree, and I went to the Conrad Hilton College at the University of Houston, and spoke to the associate dean, Dr. Boger. He used to work for Taco Bell; I didn’t know it at the time, but halfway into my discussion with him, he said, “I know who you are and I know what you’ve done, why don’t you just start teaching?”
• Because there’s a certain activity in these large corporations where you don’t earn your way into it; you’re invited. He knew what it meant to go to Russia, or any market, really.
• So I created a class called “Innovation and Unconventional Marketing” as a graduate level course and a bachelor level course—it was meant as a mix. I brought all the systems and techniques that I’ve learned from Kraft, Jacobs, Suchard, Young and Rubicam, and other advertising agencies or corporations.
• I included how they use systems thinking to develop clarity and purpose for the programs they were initiating, whether it was in communications for an ad, or an initiative to open up a distribution channel.
• They had different processes, and then I had created my own as well. I had invented a brand creation process; I was dragged through it by my client, Lesieur, because during one project they had said, “All that functionality of a brand is nice; it’s intellectually stimulating, but where’s the soul?”
• And they gave me two weeks to develop a process that would deliver the soul of a brand, which I did for the account, which was a multi-million dollar account. At that level you’re basically selling ideas for millions of dollars. You know, you sell a logo for $150,000 not $50. So I built the class on that.
• And then an assistant provost introduced me to the dean of the technology college, and I shared with him what I knew about the evolution of innovation.
• Innovation has taken on the aspects of an emerging market. When you start seeing associations developing around a particular topic, that pushes a degree of awareness and unity into the subject that evolves as an actual marketplace. And then people start writing articles and things of that nature, and then people start competing. When other companies start competing, then they’re actually creating the market, whether the consumer wants it or not. Over time, it could evolve and disappear, but generally not if the relevance is there. Innovation, as a market, was demonstrating principles that were consistent with an industry.
• And so I shared with him what it was doing and what I thought it would be, because there’s foresight in all this. Whenever you’re developing something that’s not here today, you’re using foresight to develop a sense of cognitive fluidity. Things are always changing, and you have to evaluate things by the way they are changing, not by what you know.
• Cognitive crystallization is about things that you know, and do you apply them in a given situation—that has to be the basis. The fluidity part is, can you engage something new and understand it as being new?

So, let me jump in on that. It seems like your marketing background encapsulates the desire to affect change within groups, or people or systems.

• Exactly.

And then that desire to catalyze change began to interweave itself with the concept of innovation, which by definition is change into perpetuity.

• Exactly.

And therefore you have to begin to realize that humanity has proven to resist change. There is an element of change management, when you look at the human system, that requires some teasing a little bit sometimes because it doesn’t happen naturally. Which is an odd thing to say, because as an individual, I can spontaneously change—I mean, that’s evolution. But as a group I think we’ve done a really awful job.

• Right. And it’s going to be like that for a while. It’s human nature.
• We engage with things with a sense of what we control, and what we control is what we engage in, in the way of what we know. It’s a process.

Which is an odd contradiction. But innovation in marketing and really innovation in general is not necessarily about technology as much as it is about a way of thinking; about a way of approaching things.

• Absolutely.

Technology is just one piece of the puzzle, or it’s a means. Innovation can even be what we’re discussing now: how to think, how to behave.

• Right.
• And so with the dean at the college, we created three degrees around this approach. We have a minor degree, which is about applied innovation, which covers the skills of thinking, or the disciplines.
• Then we have technology leadership and innovation management, which is a baccalaureate degree that trains people to manage technology and technology teams, solutions and orientation.
• Then there’s a master’s level, which is engineering technology innovation and management. The cornerstone of these curricula is a program called Innovation Engineering that’s been around for 35 years. Doug Hall, who’s an absolute genius, originated this 12 or 13 years ago. The University of Maine collaborated with Doug and they created an industry certification, similar to Six Sigma. So, those who engage in the introductory or fundamentals course have the opportunity to earn a blue belt in Innovation Engineering.
• What we do in this program is we take that solid foundation that is focused on the skills of thinking in a manner that I’ve learned throughout my career, and we blend those. We really bring people forward, not to create a business, you know—innovation is not entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship, right? In other words, it’s not starting a business.
• It’s not brainstorming: brainstorming is only a piece of the chain of innovation. And it’s not design thinking: design thinking is a piece of innovation, but it’s not the be-all and end-all, because in a big part, design thinking is linear.
• It’s a discussion of the problem to develop a solution for that particular situation. That’s part of innovation.
• But the disciplines of thinking are completely unique in that it uses design thinking as a discipline, or uses mind mapping as a discipline, because it’s all about stimulating your brain. You stimulate your brain in a manner that you can mash other ideas together.
• See, innovation is an association of other ideas. So if you look at innovation, you have to be able to define it in a succinct, clear way. And we see innovation as the development and productization of something that is meaningfully unique. It’s got to be meaningful to somebody, preferably to the person creating it, but it certainly has to be meaningful. But it’s also got to be unique. Now, unique doesn’t mean new to the world. That’s great if it is, but it can be unique to the situation within which the innovator is engaged.

The Internet revolution and the information age are still relatively new. We’re just 30 years in and we’re still adjusting how we think, going from the industrial age to information age. But from what I’m hearing you say, innovation can easily be applied to asking things like, do we need a new concept around currency? Are we at a point where we need to reevaluate our political system? And I’m not suggesting there’s a right way to do it, but is democracy, as we know it, the best solution? Or, looking forward 50 and 100 years to the point where we have a multiplanetary kind of system, is there something starting to develop that technology allows us to get everybody there?

• Well, yeah, I get that. We should always be sensitive to the dynamics of where the world is going, and that is something that we’ve never experienced before. And we’re bumping up against what’s called future shock.

Right. I remember the book: Alvin Toffler.

• Yeah, we experienced that in the 60s. And we’re stumbling all over 4.0. We really are.
• The World Economic Forum pointed out that the number one concern of businesses is the lack of innovation skills. In the GE Innovation Barometer research, they pointed out that executives around the world said their biggest impediment to competitive ability is the lack of innovation skills in the workforce.

When you say “innovation skills”, what specifically does that mean?

• Problem solving and leadership. Because we’re addressing the issues that we’ve always known.
• Also in the energy industry, it’s reported that there’s a 28% skills gap in innovation—in Europe, it’s around 32% or 34%. And then you have roughly 28% of the workforce that is going to retire in the next five years, just for industry 5.0.
• Then you also have the dynamic aspect of how workforce skills degrade by 50% over six years, if they’re not currently and constantly in engagement.
• And if you have this setup, where you have a lack of innovation skills, the disciplines of thinking, which is cognitive flexibility, and the ability to embrace failure: fail fast, fail cheap, to engage the unknown, logic modeling, critical thinking, systems thinking, all these dynamics.
• If you have that dearth moving today, and you have the erosion of skills—and it’s new, so that not a lot of people know how to teach innovation, other than leadership classes and entrepreneurship classes and things like that. But that’s not the disciplines of thinking—philosophy is.

So, you’re saying innovation is actually more about thinking differently about the system, and there’s a really profound gap between what the world thinks innovation is, and what you’re describing.

• Yes. It’s not inventing. It’s an outcome. An entrepreneurial new business is an outcome. Brainstorming and those types of techniques, those are disciplines of deployment.

Interesting. So Ben Franklin could be considered an inventor, not necessarily an innovator.

• But he had to have innovative capabilities. Because if you look at a lot of the things he did, it was the mashing of other ideas.
• Say that you want to develop a really cool aspect of the supply chain, and you find that back in ancient China in 1,200 or 1,000 BC that they did a certain thing, and you reapply that to today, that’s innovation.
• Your biggest impediment to being innovative is fear: fear that you don’t know, fear that somebody is going to make fun of you, whatever—it’s the unknown.
• The energy industry and supply chain to some degree operates on scale. If you mess up, you’re going to ripple that thing all the way down the line. It’s not just a $100,000 cost for the mistake, but when it rolls out downstream, it can be hundreds of millions of dollars an hour. So there’s some resistance to change: if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.
• But everything is in a constant state of decay. Our physical world, our universe, is in a constant state of decay in a flow of cause and effect. And so managing everything the way we do today doesn’t apply to the evolution of advancement and the decay that’s currently going on all the time: cause and effect, cause and effect everywhere.
• So you have to engage in the reality of those changes, and be able to associate those to the values and the things that you’re doing.
• The way you do that is you stimulate your mind. And there’s techniques. For example, you can actually search patents, just Google the name of your idea, and patents will come up and there’ll be 60% of patents that are expired. So you could pull your data from there and you actually have a template to write a patent; we teach how to write patents in our class.
• Then there’s the question of teamwork. How do you communicate in a manner that your idea can inspire people to give you access to resources.
• Too many people are so committed to the end result that they overlook the constellation of small decisions and steps that are taken to get there.
• In the class, we don’t have a midterm, we don’t have a final, we don’t have a 1,000 word paper, we don’t have extra credit. We have templates that guide the students through systems thinking and logic modelling. And that’s what philosophy is, it’s logic modelling. It’s pulling things into a consensus.
• Like a value chain, it has to sync up and make sense and they have to be balanced, somewhat like a supply chain. When there’s disharmony, when there’s disruption, that balance begins to become awkward and you have to go in and engage, and you engage with your mind. You change the world first with your mind.
• And so we teach these disciplines of thinking, and we teach the challenges of engaging your plan or your idea, with the understanding that you don’t just plan to the end result. You engage the value chain of concept productization by the death threats that you will encounter.

There’s so much to unpack in this Dave! So, you’re saying that one of the things that needs to be done with your students is that you almost need to deconstruct a lot of the frameworks that they’ve been conditioned with so they can allow themselves the elasticity of thinking required for innovation.

• You hit it right there. I’ve seen hardened professionals just break down in the program. And as flexible as my career had been, it was a real challenge for me. And I still learn, of course, because everything’s fluid. But here’s the problem with most people—actually, everybody in America and in the Western world has encountered this—you, me, everybody.
• This is what you have to overcome: your mom handed you things in your right hand (if you’re left handed, I appreciate your grace in this dialogue). But she handed you things in your right hand. And in some countries, they’ll even tape the left hand so that the child can’t grab anything with it, even if they’re left handed.
• Then at some point, you start handing things back to your mom in your right hand, and then you’re communicating, right? That’s a communication. You’re barely one year old, you’re effectively an amoeba, and your only issue is survival.
• Then your mom points to something, and says, that’s the dog, chair, dad, mom, and so on. And then the baby starts learning to point to things that it wants, and it gets rewarded for that, and it’s all with the right hand.
• Then at some point, they learn words, and then words start giving construct to cognitive thought. So then they manage to parse words together into a sentence. That’s a pattern. At which point, the child’s ability to survive is dependent on the management of its environment and the ability to communicate. And the ego, which is self-awareness slides over to the left side of the brain and becomes dominant. It can control.
• Then the education system relies upon that dominance to teach memorization, and to always be reliant on what you know, and if it’s not part of that then you’re losing control, which is part of that fear aspect. Whereas unique solutions evolve, and that’s what you want
• You know, when you’re creating an emerging market, or you’re competing, you’re looking for that something that’s going to change the rules. As Ross Perot said, “the only way to compete is to change the rules on the competition.”
• That comes from the right side of your brain, which is chaos, but it’s holistic and it sees things in totality.
• So the challenge for our students and professionals is to let go of the rigidity of what they know, the memorization, the control, the patterns that we tend to just fall into and then just keep repeating, but to allow the strength of that to provide guardrails that allow the right side of the brain to just go.
• And 85% of the market is left brain oriented. So, when you’re confronting somebody with a great idea, and, for example, your boss says, “We did that five years ago, and it really didn’t work. I don’t think that’s a good idea.” They’re not saying it’s a bad idea, really they’re just saying, “Based on this rigidity, no.”
• But that’s giving you, as a practitioner of innovation, just a validation of a death threat. To be able to quantify your idea—we can quantify an idea—and then present that quantification (and there’s other methodology, Fermi estimating, and so on) because you have to understand that we are engaging with decision makers; there’s a decision maker along the value chain of an idea becoming reality.
• And you have to be addressing those decision makers in the manner that is relevant to their understanding. And most often, it might be a finance person that has a heavy left brain, or risk avoidance, and you’ve got to be able to prove the ability of your idea in a quantifiable and systematic manner, that reduces a significant amount of that threat.
• And you should be focusing on prototyping your best practices in a scenario manner that allows you to prove it out before it gets put in place with major investments; that’s fail fast, fail cheap, in cycles of failure.
• So you plan for your idea to fail, and then what you’re going to do about it. Then you foresight the value chain of decision makers, or situations or the market or the user as you develop your idea.
• We tell students that simply because they got it wrong, it’s only the prototyping of their thought—they have to pivot.
• The US military looked at our program and said they’ve never seen anything like it. They recognize that the theater is shifting and evolving.
• So these are some of the core dynamics of innovation, which is everything before you get to the business idea, or you develop that business. It’s the skills of thinking. Edward de Bono said, “You can’t dig a new hole by digging the same one deeper.”
• You have to understand that failure doesn’t mean fail, it means pivot. Unless, of course, you find a death threat that’s just absolute and it’s done, and you’re just not gonna make it, fine, you didn’t invest a ton of money in it. You fail fast, fail cheap, you move on. Your objective hasn’t changed, or the end goal; you just find another pathway to get there.

Innovation is a hot topic right now. A lot of companies are trying to use the term innovation as a central theme, but I’m not sure, based on our discussion, that people really understand what innovation truly is.

• No, they think it’s a marketing terminology. We have students coming into our class that are answering these challenges as if they’re a marketing challenge that they’re going to advertise or whatever it is. No, no, no, no, no.
• It’s not about marketing, it’s about the disciplines of your thought. How do you develop that, how do you analyze things for what they are?
• And you know, what’s interesting, as I mentioned, this is about the evolution of the marketplace and the workforce, right?
• All of this that I previously described is occurring, and yet 5.0 isn’t four or five years away, it’s happening now.
• So we have a workforce that has a gap. These new generations are engaging in problems, are engaging the world that they haven’t really got a lot of experience in, and they’re going to be addressing problems that they’ve never experienced before.
• And they’re going to have this waterfall of solutions that will be inundating the workforce, that they’ve never experienced or had any any understanding—all of which is going to create new problems and new policies and new activities that are unknown, that are going to create disruption that nobody has experienced.
• And then it’s going to be cyclical—it’s a cyclical conundrum. We are not ready for this.

You said earlier that about 80% or 85% of people remain in a left-brained, non-innovative way of thinking, because it’s comfortable, it’s safe, and it’s a habit. So, since you’re teaching this and have seen what happens, can anybody become an innovative thinker?

• We believe similarly to the Innovation Engineering Institute: we believe that anybody can be trained to be innovative. Anybody.
• It’s like dribbling a basketball: when you first hand somebody a basketball, they’re going to be miserable, but then they keep dribbling the basketball, which is what our program does. The brain, eventually, through these systems that we go through, over and over and over becomes comfortable with the right side blending with the boundaries and the attributes of the left.
• The idea is to have a more balanced brain, and a balanced brain is 60/40: 60% left brain and 40% right brain. Once that occurs, the students just zoom right through it.
• We get these messages: “This has changed my life”, “I’m thinking differently”, “I’m coming up with ideas I’ve never thought of before”—they’re just throwing that out there, unsolicited.
• When they graduate, the students have this portal with a rich toolkit: they have the TRIZ methodology, PO, a Monte Carlo calculator that projects five years sales growth—all these different tools for two years. So they graduate with the mental capacity and the disciplines to deploy it.
• When they first start working for a company, they’re five years down the road on the first several months of their deploy.
• This is a very important issue for us in America, because other countries have figured it out, including China.

Well, I would suggest that China has a certain mindset – but are they innovative, though? Or are they really good at at taking innovations and then using them to their advantage?

• Both, probably, but certainly know the latter, if you look at where they’ve invested their money in research.
• Americans, even though we do applied research, the basis and the dominance of our academics is empirical. And then it’s kind of reliant upon industry to figure out what to do with it.
• Whereas China and other countries are investing in what’s called experiential, or experimental, or applied research, where they’re looking at the dynamics of what other people are doing, because it’s all footprints, and they’re up in the web, because one thing that academia does really well is they publish. They’re taking that and applying it in real world scenarios, and as they’re doing that, they’re also educating the workforce in that applied activity.
• And if you look at where their money has been invested over the past 5 to 10 years , it’s been doubling every year for over 10 years in terms of the amount of money they’re putting into experiential research.
• And meanwhile, we feel that we have a cause to bring this dynamic subject in a manner to start emboldening the workforce to prepare it, because of what’s going to happen with industry 5.0.
• I had a conversation at a conference with a bunch of technology and energy companies, in which I pointed all this out, with the retirement age and so on, and they really freaked out over this—you could visibly see people move and react to it.
• Technology companies do what they do best: they create and compete by developing the new greatest thing, and they have ways to force distribute that technology, whether the customer wants it or not.
• Their competition will impose itself on the supply chain and industry. In the course of doing so, they don’t have a workforce capable of scaling it beyond its initial introduction. That’s serious.
• Artificial intelligence is at the wellhead, and it’s opening so many questions that they don’t have answers for, because they don’t even know what questions to ask.

But therein lies part of the Innovator’s Dilemma, going back to Clayton Christensen’s book. We get to a point where innovation starts happening, then it happens in an even more rapid clip, to the point where uncertainty is just a daily fact of life. Then you are innovating so rapidly, that there is no longer a status quo. We’ve spent so much time trying to organize into a more systematic, repeatable process, but that’s contrary to innovation, which is breaking that down and changing that pattern and changing that process.

• Exactly. We tend to focus on teaching somebody how to do a job. And they’ll teach somebody how to do a job.
• But if you teach somebody the skill sets of innovation, they become mentors to the people around them. You build this perpetual movement, inside the workforce, by this approach.
• Otherwise you become linear: I’m going to train all these people to do a job and they’ll do the job. But are they building a culture that’s progressive? Does it advance itself in unknown ways?
• Henry Ford said this: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”. Nobody told Steve Jobs to put a camera in a phone.

I’ll give you one that I always love: when Alexander Graham Bell invented the phonograph and listed the ten use cases for that photograph, not one of them was playing music. I do want to make a shout out that you’re at the University of Houston, and what you’re teaching at the University of Houston will be at the forefront of everything that’s coming in the next 100 years as we move out into space.

• Yes, absolutely. And on top of that, dare I say, the leadership of disruption.

So, I’m gonna hit pause on this for now. But it has been an awesome conversation, and it’s easily our longest episode because I just hate to end the conversation. But people can find you on LinkedIn and at the University of Houston. Do you have your own website?

• Oh, no, I just do what I do. I’m blessed to be doing what I do.
• I’m at the College of Technology at the University of Houston, so you can find me on the faculty page.
• LinkedIn is probably one of the best places to find me.

Again, Dave, honestly, thank you so much. I know we’re gonna chat again. And there’s a lot to keep going on this one, with the great program and your great story. Thank you for being on today.

• Well, thank you, Richard. It’s a pleasure being of service to you and your audience.