Product Quest Podcast

Episode 28: Innovating Emergent Futures with Iain Kerr and Jason Frasca

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

Episode 27: Innovation in Public Utilities with Giorgio Pauletto

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

Episode 26: Coaching Executives with Mr. Joe

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

Episode 25: Overcoming JTBD project challenges

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?

Episode 24: Service Design with Tim MacArthur

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

Episode 23: Gerry McGovern on Top Tasks, part 2

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.

Episode 22: Gerry McGovern on Top Tasks, part 1

Today we talk to 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.
 
Referenced on the show:
World Wide Waste, Gerry McGovern
Top Tasks, Gerry McGovern
Transform, A rebel’s guide to digital transformation, Gerry McGovern
The Burnout Society, Byung Chul Han

Episode 21: Dr. Min Basadur on Simplexity

Dr. Min Basadur is Professor Emeritus at McMaster University and founder of Basadur Applied Creativity. He has three patents and a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology.
But Min is best known for his creativity system, Simplexity. In the 1970’s, Min developed his method when building upon the work of colleague Sid Parnes. It’s a system… complete with all the essentials for defining problems, for generating solutions, and for selecting the best to act upon. It also considers the dynamics of different thinking styles – and includes an innovation profiler, which we are sure to discuss. This is part 2 of our discussion with Min.
 
Referenced on the show:
The Power of Innovation, Min Basadur
Scatterbrains, Min Basadur & Richard Perez
Basadur Innovation Profile
Simplex, A Flight to Creativity, Min Basadur
Why Greatness Cannot be Planned, Kenneth Stanley
Design-Centered Entrepreneurship, Min Basadur & Michael Goldsby

Episode 20: Dr. Min Basadur on Simplexity

Dr. Min Basadur is Professor Emeritus at McMaster University and founder of Basadur Applied Creativity. He has three patents and a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology.
But Min is best known for his creativity system, Simplexity. In the 1970’s, Min developed his method when building upon the work of colleague Sid Parnes. It’s a system… complete with all the essentials for defining problems, for generating solutions, and for selecting the best to act upon. It also considers the dynamics of different thinking styles – and includes an innovation profiler, which we are sure to discuss. This is part 1 of our discussion with Min.
 
Referenced on the show:
Scatterbrains, Min Basadur & Richard Perez
Design-Centered Entrepreneurship, Min Basadur & Michael Goldsby
Basadur Innovation Profile
Cognitive Psychology, Neisser

Episode 19: Entrepreneurship with Murat Goker and Francesco Cardoletti, part 2

As listeners know, on the show we love to dive deep into innovation and business theories and frameworks. But at the end of the day what really matters is actually building products and services that people want in order to build successful businesses. Well… our guests today definitely know a lot about that, Murat Göker and Francesco Cardoletti are both successful and experienced serial entrepreneurs who have built businesses in diverse industries and geographical regions. This is part 1 of our discussion.
Murat has built and operated ventures in retail fashion, concierge services, commodities trading, advising micro-startup for equity and for the past 10 years, he has ventured into pharma. Namely in 2013 he founded Ideogen with his father and brothers: a 360 degrees commercialization platform for specialty therapies (mainly orphan or rare disease) in which he currently serves as Chief Commercial Officer.
Francesco has built and operated ventures in the health, telecom, fin-tech, fashion and edu-tech sectors in both the UK and US. He is the co-founder and was the CEO of PawSquad, a company providing telemedicine for pets, which was acquired by IVC Evidensia in 2018. He currently works as Strategy and Product Lead at Unilever Foundry where he works with the best scaleups and startups in the world to launch disruptive innovation on a global scale. 
 
Murat and Francesco have worked together as business partners in the past and as all great teams, they are very complementary in their approach and ways of thinking which is the reason why we decided to invite both of them together on the show!