On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, IO CoFounder, sat down with Katherine Radeka, author of the new book, High Velocity Innovation and CEO of Rapid Learning Cycles. They talk about innovation and Agile. And specifically how it fits into the hardware space, why everyone needs to be a part of the innovation process, and then most importantly, how companies can better align their innovation efforts with their core business.

Interview Transcript with Katherine Radeka, Author of High Velocity Innovation & CEO of Rapid Learning Cycles

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Katherine Radeka, author of the new book, High Velocity Innovation. Katherine and I talk about innovation and agile and specifically how it fits into the hardware space, why everyone needs to working on the innovation process at your organization, and then most importantly, how companies can better align their innovation efforts with their core business.

Brian Ardinger: 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.

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 Katherine Radeka. She is the CEO of the Rapid Learning Cycles Institute and author of the new book High Velocity Innovation: How to get your best ideas to market faster. Welcome to the show, Katherine.

Katherine Radeka: Thank you.

Innovation Journey

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on to talk about your new book. You have a varied background. I want to talk a little bit about the differences between innovating in the real world versus in the software world.  Why don't we give our audience a little bit of background about your path in innovation?

Katherine Radeka: I was working for Hewlett Packard and their inkjet printer division, and I made the transition to working with the blended teams that it takes to put together a printer is a printer, is a blend of the hardware and the ink cartridges and the firmware and the software drivers.

And so program manager in that space has to be familiar with all of those different disciplines. What I learned very early on was that hardware is hard. That the reason why we were always being told to fix things in software is that once they release something to the manufacturing environment, it is a very, very expensive thing to fix.

That became a passion for me, was to figure out how do we deliver hardware more effectively? How do we eliminate the problems that tend to arise in late development? That tend to make hardware programs disappointing. Either late or if they can't be late, they might be down scope, so they're disappointing. Or they might cost too much. To try to figure out how we could make it so that a person that had a great idea for a new physical thing, a new tangible thing, could be just as successful with innovation as a person that has an idea for new software.

Innovation Learning in High Velocity Innovation & Rapid Learning Cycles

Brian Ardinger:  You decided to write a book about all your experiences with Hewlett Packard and Keurig and Johnson and Johnson, Whirlpool, all these great companies. And I imagine through that work process, you learned quite a bit about innovation. What's the biggest learning you think the audience will get from it?

Katherine Radeka: One of the things that I learned early on is that if you really want an organization to be innovative, you need to pull innovation from that group. Even for a person that thinks of themselves as creative, they're not necessarily going to be creative in the direction that you want them to be, unless they're well aligned with the direction that the organization wants to go.

One of the companies that I feature in the book is a company Gallagher. Gallagher is a security products company based in New Zealand. They invented the electric fence for livestock, but then they expanded from there. And they have relentless innovation as part of their DNA. And so you walk into Gallaher and it doesn't matter who you are, you will contribute to the innovation culture of that company.

They pull it out of you by making it such a strong part of the environment that you're in, by making it tied to your performance there and whether or not you're going to be a successful employee at Gallagher will depend on your ability to innovate by tying metrics and performance goals to innovation success.

By having a repeatable process for innovation that they've honed over time. And so you walk in there and the entire organization from top to bottom aligns around the need for innovation. And more importantly, they have a strategic plan for innovation. They're aligning around the need for the specific innovations that are going to enable Gallagher to do what it wants to do in the market.

The entire organization from top to bottom is aligned around the need for innovation. And more importantly, they have a strategic plan for innovation. They're aligned around the need for the specific innovations...

As a result, they can take an idea, they can screen it to see if it's in alignment with the direction they want to go. And then they can execute on that idea very quickly, because everything's aligned. So to create a smooth path for an idea to get to market, then the hardware stays that's especially important because the thing that makes hardware programs much more difficult is the fact that you have these high costs of change decisions.

They can't be revisited later, or at least not without incurring a lot of delay or a lot of costs. What Gallagher has been able to do is to figure out how to create this path that eliminates the need to revisit any of those decisions late in a program, when they're expensive. A lot of what High Velocity Innovation is about is how to help teams make really good decisions when those decisions have to stick.

High Velocity Innovation in Corporations & Rapid Learning Cycles

Brian Ardinger: You mention a case study of a company that's figuring out some of this stuff. Some of the things  ring true as far as figuring out the incentives. And figuring out the culture. And that's where a lot of corporate innovators fall down.  If I'm a corporate innovator thinking and hearing more about what you're talking about, what are some of the first steps that I should be thinking about for how to implement this high velocity innovation and rapid learning cycles within my own group?

Katherine Radeka: I think the first and most important thing is to understand why your company needs innovation. What is it that they're looking to get from innovation? Because that will help you understand where the most valuable innovation is likely to come from and ho...