Product Quest Podcast

Decisions shape the future. Making better decisions is critical for people and for society.Businesses make strategic decisions all the time about where to invest, who to partner with, where toadvertise and much more. Customers make decisions about what products to buy and to use. Innovators, designers and engineers make decisions about what to build so that customers purchase and use what they makeBusinesses have become more and more data-driven, with data science becoming ubiquitous, butconventional data science has its limitations.
In this episode we discuss why understanding causality is critical for making better decisions and how leadingbusinesses are increasingly looking to incorporate causality in their data driven decision makingOur guest today is Paul Hünermund. Paul is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Innovation at theCopenhagen Business School, his research interests lie in the area of innovation, firm strategy, R&D policyand causal inference. He is the co-founder of causalscience.org, a platform for fostering knowledge exchangebetween industry and academia on topics related to causal data science.
References mentioned on the show:
Causal Machine Learning and Business Decision Making by P. Hünermund, J. Kaminski and C. Schmitt
The Book of Why by Judea Pearl

In this special episode we review all the guests we interviewed on the show this year and reflect upon what we learned, what we liked and the questions we wished we had asked!
This episode turned out to be much longer than planned, so here are the timestamps if you want to jump to a particular guest:
01:40          Ruth Hartt
15:50        Lance Bettencourt
25:04       Ronan and Jane
31:20        Indi Young
40:14       Jim Kalbach
53:00       Dan Adams
1:05:30    Beat Walther
1:13:00    Jan Schmiedgen
1:22:00    Katerina Kozludzhova
1:25:10     Murat and Francesco
1:31:17      Michele Hansen
1:41:45     Lindsay Zaltman
1:54:50    Min Basadur
2:04:30    Gerry McGovern
2:11:20     Giorgio Pauletto
2:19:50     Tim Macarthur
2:24:10     Joe Leech
2:32:00    Ian Kerr & Jason Frasca
2:37:15     Sergei Ikovenko
2:46:20    Tony Ulwick

Today, we welcome our special guest, Tony Ulwick. If you’ve worked in, read about, or even heard of JTBD, then you know his name. Tony is the creator of Outcome-Driven Innovation, known as ODI. ODI takes this theory, this philosophy of JTBD and presents it as a repeatable process. 
Tony is well published with his key work from 2005  “What Customers Want" or his HBR articles “Turn Customer Input into Innovation” and “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map” which have become classic reads of our field.

Today, we welcome Dr. Sergei Ikovenko. Sergei is one of the world’s leading authorities in the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, commonly known as TRIZ. He has conducted over 1,500 workshops (that’s 1500) on TRIZ at a long list of companies, including P&G, GE, and Hyundai… and many others, including the Chinese Patent Office and the Swiss Patent Office…he’s lectured all over the world at Harvard, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford.  Sergei has doctorates in mechanical engineering as well as environmental engineering – and to keep it interesting -  a master’s degree in patent law. He’s written over 100 publications and books, has been a TEDx speaker and keynote speaker at events such as the MIT Sloan Management Forum.

Our guests today are Iain Kerr and Jason Frasca from Emergent Futures Lab (emergentfutureslab.com), a strategic innovation consulting firm focused on radical innovation.
Iain and Jason founded the Emergent Futures Lab in 2018 as a platform for the rethinking of creativity, invention, and change. They have developed a number of new tools including the Innovation Design Approach, which we will be talking about today.
Iain Kerr is a designer working at the intersection of creativity, ecology, and emergent systems.
He is a Co-Director of the MIX Lab at Montclair State University within the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation He is a co-founder of SPURSE, an award winning creative design consultancy that focuses on social, ecological and ethical transformation. He regularly works as a consultant, lecturer and workshop leader on creativity, innovation, and design and has done so for institutions such as MIT, Harvard, Columbia University, Parsons, Yale, and others. He formally studied philosophy and architecture, but his deep immersion in the wilderness around Vancouver where he grew up spawned many interests that have since expanded to cover a wide range of fields including ecology, complexity science and evolutionary theory and as you will see these are major influences on his work.
Jason Frasca is a native New Yorker and an entrepreneurial business executive, marketing, and sales professional who has worked with Fortune 500 and nationally recognized clients in many diverse sectors of the economy. He cut his teeth at Boardroom Reports, a business newsletter to executives, where he learned Direct Response Marketing from several legends in the field
With Iain he is also a Co-Director of the MIX Lab at Montclair State University where he teaches innovation, entrepreneurship, sustainability, marketing and provides mentoring to startups. His research revolves around disruptive innovation models and frameworks for entrepreneurship and he uses 3D Printing as a mechanism to demonstrate and teach these methods and approaches.
You can find out more about Iain and Jason here:
emergentfutureslab.com
 
Referenced on the show:
Books by Deleuze
Books by Stephen J Gould
Books by Elisabet Vrba
The Wright Brothers, David McCullough
The Box, Marc Levinson
The Art of Noticing, Rob Walker

Our guest today is Giorgio Pauletto. Giorgio is Head of Strategy and Innovation at SIG, the Industrial Services of Geneva. SIG is Geneva’s public utility company, providing water, energy and telecommunication services to the canton of Geneva.
Giorgio studied management sciences and engineering at Stanford, got a doctorate in econometrics at the university of Geneva and was a visiting fellow both at the Hoover institution in Stanford and then at Yale.
Before joining SIG, he worked as a Technology, Strategy and foresight advisor for the state of Geneva. 
Today we will be talking to Giorgio about  how to foster innovation within a large public utilities company and the challenges that one faces. And we will also talk about how to get a glimpse into the future through foresight also known as future studies.
 
Referenced on the show:
The Corporate Startup, Tendayi Viki
Black Swan, Nassim Taleb
Looking at Mindfulness, Christophe André

Today we have an exciting guest Joe Leech. Joe is an energetic coach and advisor to CEOs, has a lot of experience working with startups, high growth tech unicorns and Fortune 100 companies. 20 billion $ in revenue go through the products he has worked on, an impressive number. He has a background in psychology, more specifically in neuroscience, was a primary school teacher for some time and has written a book I want to recommend about Design and Psychology: Psychology for designers, a pocket guide. Besides that he is also a great and very entertaining speaker and writer. Today however will focus on C-level questions and how Jobs-to-be-done can help answer them. So, stick around if you want to learn why Jobs-to-be-done is one of the keys to successful C-level strategy.
 
Referenced on the show:
Psychology of Design, Joe Leech
Empowered, Marty Cagan 
Nokia “Burning Platform” memo, Stephen Elop
The Last Blockbuster Netflix documentary

Today we the Product Quest Podcast Team discuss the challenges you face when it comes to Jobs-to-be-done projects. What can go wrong? What needs to be in place before you start? And of course what can you do to overcome them? What are the learnings from all of our experience in applying Jobs-to-be-done in many industries?

Today we will deep dive into the topic of service design with our guest Tim Macarthur. Tim Macarthur is a Service Designer based in Dublin. His career has seen him work in the enterprise such as IBM, in consultancy and in service innovation for various international organizations. Tim co-founded the Service Design Network in Ireland and is a visiting lecturer at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin. Tim is deeply interested in the intersection of Service Design and other disciplines in bringing valuable, delightful services to life. Certainly, a mission we can all get behind.
 
And here's the reading list we promised:
 
This is Service Design Thinking, Marc Stickdorn
This is Service Design Doing, Marc Stickdorn
Orchestrating Experiences, Chris Risdon & Patrick Quattlebaum
Designing the Invisible, Lara Penin

This is part two of our talk with Gerry McGovern. He has developed Top Tasks, a design framework that helps identify what truly matters to people. It has been developed over a 15-year period and applied more than 500 times by companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Toyota, and governmental organizations such as the European Union and of course the Irish government and the WHO.
Gerry is a highly regarded speaker and has proven it in more than 40 countries around the world, he appeared on CNN, the BBC an various other media. He has written 8 books of which I strongly recommend Top Task a how-to guide, and another one Transform: A rebel’s guide for digital transformation and of course his latest book called World Wide Waste: How digital is killing the planet and what to do about it.