What Makes LEGO a Persistent Innovator?

In this episode, we talk about the challenges of innovating in biopharma with a veteran of that industry, Dan Seewald. Seewald is the former Head of Worldwide Innovation at Pfizer, the $100 billion pharma giant headquartered in Manhattan, and now the founder and CEO of the consulting and training firm Deliberate Innovation. Among the questions that InnoLead CEO Scott Kirsner covers with Seewald:

• How do you create space for new ideas in a regulated industry?
• What's your advice on exploring the potential of AI? 
• How do you effectively communicate an internal innovation initiative?
• How do you deal with all of the legal and compliance colleagues who are very good at saying "no" to new ideas?
• What he'd do differently if he was starting over at Pfizer.

This episode was hosted by Scott Kirsner and edited by David Swope.

Who’s leading the charge on generative AI in big organizations? How are they managing the tension between moving quickly and not making major missteps? And what use cases are they moving forward with? 

In this episode, we dive into the rapidly-evolving world of generative AI with Paul Baier, the CEO and co-founder of GAI Insights. 

Baier talks about the vendor landscape and shares several examples of first-mover companies, including McDonald's and Walmart, that are making strides in deploying generative AI.

You can subscribe to our podcast, “Innovation Answered,” on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts.

Scott Kirsner hosts this episode; Hadley Thompson produced it.

"For too long," says Todd Dunn, "many organizations have not developed innovation as a strategic and ongoing source of competitive advantage. Instead, some organizations have used it for reputational points in the public eye, but not to deliver measurable value to consumers, customers and the company."

That's a big problem, argues Dunn, who was most recently the Vice President of Enterprise Innovation at Advocate Health. Advocate is headquartered in Charlotte, NC, and it’s the fifth biggest nonprofit health system in the US. 

In this episode, we talk with Dunn about what went wrong in Act 1 of corporate innovation — and what needs to change in Act 2. Our discussion was sparked by Dunn's recent LinkedIn piece, "Innovation: The Driving Force of Competitive Advantage."

You can subscribe to our podcast, “Innovation Answered,” on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts.

Scott Kirsner hosted this episode, and Hadley Thompson produced.

Design thinking is a well-known concept in the innovation sphere — it often comes up in conversation, at conferences, or in passing. But for as much as people talk about design thinking, not everyone understands its full scope — and even fewer people use it in their day-to-day work. To help bridge the gaps, we created this "beginner's guide" podcast.

For this episode, we wanted to ask some basic questions about what design thinking is, how non-experts can get up to speed, the challenges experts have seen when introducing it to others, and how it can help come to viable solutions. We chatted with Prapti Jha, a Strategist and Researcher at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Scott Wolfson, Senior Strategy Director at BCG BrightHouse; and Craig Damlo, Senior Manager at Blue Origin, to get the answers.

You can subscribe to our podcast, “Innovation Answered,” on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts.

Tyler Smith hosted and produced this episode. 

This bonus episode of "Innovation Answered" features Matt Baker, Head of Corporate Strategy at Dell Technologies. AI has generated so much interest with the release of ChatGPT; the announcements from Google, Baidu, Microsoft, and Alibaba about chatbots and generative AI; and increased adoption of art-focused AI platforms like DALL-E and Midjourney. So we decided to explore the basics and background of the technology — and what happens next.

This episode focuses on what AI is; generative AI; how it could affect jobs going forward; and how large companies' adoption of AI may create competitive advantage or disadvantage. 

Our "beginner's guide" podcast episodes take on important topics at the 101 level, without jargon or complexity, assuming that you may be new to the job of making innovation and change happen inside a big organization. We want to make things crystal clear, so you can get down to business. 

This episode is hosted and produced by InnoLead's Tyler Smith.

 

 

In this episode, we’ll dive into four questions: what is an innovation space? What are the pros and cons of physical versus virtual spaces, what are the qualities great spaces possess... and what common mistakes do people make in setting them up and running them. For expert perspective, we consult Michelle Cohen of CME Group, Andy Miller of AARP, and Michael Cross of Entergy.

Our "beginner's guide" podcast episodes take on important topics at the 101 level, without jargon or complexity, assuming that you may be new to the job of making innovation and change happen inside a big organization. We want to make things crystal clear, so you can get down to business. 

This episode is hosted and produced by InnoLead's Tyler Smith.

 

 

In our Persistent Innovators miniseries, InnoLead and Wade Roush explored the cultures of four large companies that have pushed the innovation envelope for decades: Disney, Apple, Lego, and Novartis. But who else deserves recognition? From making pizza ever more convenient at Domino's, to finding new markets at FujiFilm, we dissect the practices and strategies at six more persistently-innovative companies, with input from guests like Bill Taylor, Braden Kelley, and Rita McGrath.

Special thanks to our friends at PatSnap and Innovation Academy for sponsoring this miniseries.

How do big companies stay innovative across many decades, and in different industries? That’s been the driving question of our Persistent Innovators miniseries. In the fourth and final episode we turn to company in a very different kind of business: discovering and developing new drugs. And we focus on the global pharmaceutical giant Novartis, formed in 1996 from the merger of the venerable Swiss companies Sandoz and CIBA-Geigy. At its Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, opened in 2002, Novartis invented a new style of biology-centric drug discovery that has changed practices across the industry—and sparked a local biopharma boom that has utterly transformed the Kendall Square neighborhood of Cambridge.

Compared to the other industries we’ve covered in the miniseries, namely digital devices (Apple), entertainment (Disney), and toys (LEGO), the pharmaceutical business is downright cutthroat. Product development is risky, time-consuming, and expensive; competition is incredibly fierce; and even a blockbuster drug can become a flop once the patent expires and a generic drug makers jumps in. On top of all that, drug makers have to operate outside the traditional world of consumer marketing: You take a Novartis medicine not out of any brand loyalty to Novartis, but because your doctor tells you to.

The net effect is that to stay successful, a big drug company must keep their product pipelines full and churn out hit after hit—which, when you think about it, is the very definition of a persistent innovator. In this episode, former Novartis executive and drug hunter Tom Hughes explains how Novartis’s first CEO decided to rebuild the company’s drug discovery effort around a genomic and molecular understanding of disease. And current NIBR president Jay Bradner talks about the structures Novartis has set up to protect and promote high-output innovation. Finally, we speak with Sam Wiley, head of thought leadership and customer advocacy at PatSnap—our sponsor throughout the miniseries—about a few more companies he sees as persistent innovators.

Special thanks to our friends at PatSnap and Innovation Academy for sponsoring this miniseries.

LEGO is one of the world’s most famous and admired brands. The company’s colorful plastic bricks are the literal building blocks of an empire that spans a $5 billion annual toy business, hundreds of retail stores, 10 theme parks, and a series of hit movies. But what LEGO actually sells isn’t just the bricks, it’s a whole system of play: an endlessly expandable way for children (and adults) to combine hand, eye, and imagination.

It was when product developers drifted away from that system in the 1990s and early 2000s—introducing a blizzard of toy lines that didn’t use the bricks at all—that LEGO stumbled into serious trouble. The company had a close brush with bankruptcy in 2003, then grappled its way back to profitability by refocusing on its core customers and their passion for building things.

For this third episode of our Persistent Innovators miniseries, guest host and producer Wade Roush sought out LEGO experts like journalist Bill Breen—co-author of the authoritative LEGO history Brick by Brick—as well as former LEGO executives Robert Rasmussen (developer of the LEGO Serious Play method) and David Gram (founder of the consulting firm Diplomatic Rebels). They explain what went wrong at LEGO, how the company rediscovered the spirit of play that make its toys so beloved, and what it does today to make sure that innovation doesn’t stray too far outside the brick.

The Persistent Innovators is sponsored by Patsnap (www.patsnap.com), the Connected Innovation Intelligence company, and by Patsnap’s online courseware site Innovation Academy (academy.patsnap.com).