Innovation experts Andrea Ippolito and Suzanna Fowler share battle-tested strategies for navigating the tricky balance between operational stability and bold experimentation while keeping teams motivated and stakeholders happy.
The Cornell Certificate Program: Innovation Strategy
Andrea's company Simplifed
Leading successful innovation initiatives comes with a daunting set of challenges. You have to know how to navigate the tension between maintaining operational stability and fostering a culture of experimentation, all while managing stakeholder expectations, handling resource constraints, and making sure your innovation strategies are firmly aligned with organizational goals. That’s a lot.
There isn’t an app for that, but there is a playbook that includes proven strategies for driving innovation that you can learn and bring to your organization. If you can leverage your technical smarts with strong people skills, then you can keep teams excited, motivated, and emboldened to make smart decisions with sometimes incomplete information.
Join Andrea Ippolito, Cornell Engineering lecturer, entrepreneur, and former Presidential Innovation Fellow, and Suzanna Fowler, AVP of National Operations at AT&T, as they discuss how to overcome challenges to the innovation process and share proven pathways toward successful product development.
Whether you’re at a startup or at an established powerhouse like AT&T, you will discover practical frameworks for leading and driving innovation and business success.
Introduction
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Cornell Keynotes. On today's episode, we're learning how to drive successful innovation while aiming to strike a balance between operational stability and experimentation. Leading innovation comes with daunting challenges, managing stakeholder expectations, handling resource constraints, and making decisions with incomplete information.
And all the while keeping teams motivated. The reality is that technology is often the easy part. People are the hard part, and with AI transforming everything, leaders need frameworks for driving innovation and building team confidence as they move into uncharted territory. We're joined by two innovation leaders, Andrea Ippolito, Cornell Engineering Lecturer, entrepreneur, and former Presidential Innovation Fellow, and Susanna Fowler, a VP of National Operations at at and t where she's leading major AI driven transformations.
The two share practical strategies for [00:01:00] overcoming innovation challenges, building cohesive teams that thrive with uncertainty and securing leadership. Buy-in for big projects. You'll get actionable advice for pivoting when things don't go as planned. Now here's our conversation with Andrea Ippolito and Susanna Fowler.
Chris Wofford: . So we've brought these two experts together to learn how to lead and drive technological innovation, how to be an intrapreneur, how to deploy and empower the intrapreneurs at your organization Also.
Andrea, I'm gonna start with you.
Andrea Ippolito: Sounds great.
Chris Wofford: Good. You've worn multiple hats um, in your experience, how have you met with innovation opportunities or challenges at places like some of the larger medium corporations that you work for? Government agencies or with your startup?
Are there core principles that are transferable? That you hold onto that guide you through whatever endeavor you're embarking on.
Andrea Ippolito: Absolutely. So when you're creating this culture of innovation and entrepreneurship and whatever [00:02:00] size organization you're in, whether it's a large organization, a lot of what I'm gonna talk about is actually informed by when I was at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
This is the largest healthcare system in the country. A lot of people don't realize that. And so we spend a lot of time thinking about how do we design our innovation strategy and how do we do so? With our employees needs in mind with the ultimate goal of serving our customer. So there's a full, a few key principles that I always say you have to keep in mind.
One is you have to be very clear about your innovation intent and my parents actually met via the space program and so I always like to talk about space examples. I named my two daughters after astronauts. I always like to think about the moment of John F. Kennedy and at Rice University, , close to where Suzanna is.
He, , stood at the podium and said, we will land a man on the moon by the end of this decade. That is so clear, right? The goal is clear. The time horizon's clear, and so when you're designing an innovation strategy and creating this culture of intrapreneurship. You have to be clear [00:03:00] about your innovation intent.
You have to understand how you connect it to your overall organization goals. Because if your innovation goals aren't tied to that, then it's gonna flounder it. People aren't getting, you're not gonna get that buy-in, you're not gonna get a budget. , And it's not gonna be meaningful for folks. So that's one.
Secondly. Is you have to make sure when you're creating this intrapreneurship culture is that you also find a way to keep it a little bit separate from what we like to call the operating engine of the organization. What do I mean by this? It's not what we traditionally used to call and by in the Lockie days, the skunk works where it was so separate from the organization that whenever you were able to develop this like game changing transformational innovation, that when you work to bring it back inside the organization to then deploy it to customers or sell it to customers.
It was like an immune reaction. So you have to make sure that you're straddling the innovation part of your organization, but also have a way that it, you have a foot in. So [00:04:00] the operating engine of your organization. So what does this mean in practice? This means when you're trying to create this culture is you have innovative general counsel, you have innovative hr, you have innovative procurement practices, right?
, The machinery of how innovations ultimately can get out to practice. You are working with supply chain and manufacturing along the way, but not too early because then you'll have that immune reaction. And then the last thing is you have to measure what matters when you're working in this culture of entrepreneurship, because ultimately if it doesn't deliver back that return on investment to the organization, then it's gonna be DOA, and you're not gonna get that continued funding or you're gonna bloom a thousand flowers, but nothing is gonna hit reality.
You need to measure what matters to your organization and identify those KPIs from the start. And maybe you don't hit all of them and you, there is a high failure right here, but that's okay. You gotta measure what you can meaningfully share to your leadership.
Chris Wofford: Suzanna Fowler, I want to turn to you, so you've described to me in our pregame [00:05:00] huddle the other day about some of the big moves that you're making in transforming operations at at and t as always, laser focused on customer service.
Right? That's the mantra. AI is driving a lot of this. So what are some of the challenges that you've come up against, and have you established any best practices amidst all this rapid fire sweeping change that we're undergoing?
Suzanna Fowler: , I'm totally aligned with Andrea, like what we've seen inside at and t, .
And we've had to apply some practices around making sure that we're very clear. We have a lot of clarity around those innovation principles, ultimately, , we don't wanna get lost in the tech. The tech is an enabler and we wanna stay hyper-focused on the human experiences and the, , business outcomes,
both for our employees and for our customers. . When you work on some of these innovation programs, you can easily get lost in how cool some of the emerging technology is, but staying really keeping that clarity of the innovation and staying super focused [00:06:00] on that human experience.
Especially with AI and the business outcome, it helps you track the ROI, , in the right way. And, , and all of those other factors that are a little bit more qualitative on top of, , your innovation goal. , I think the other piece here is like involving your employees early and often in the innovation and seeking regular feedback and responding to the feedback.
That part is really important so that everyone that's affected by the change. Sees themself in the change versus, , so they're a part of the mission versus this is innovation that is happening to me versus I am a part of the innovation. At at and t we really are, have deployed a lot of strategies to, , make sure that our employees feel like they are a part of the innovation and we're equipping them and they're enabled to be, , a part of the mission that we have to serve our customers.
Chris Wofford: So I [00:07:00] wanna stick with you, Suzanna. You know, we were talking also a moment ago that everyone's having to learn really fast. Mm-hmm. Right? The business environment is requiring it. , This is a horse race. How do you build confidence and establish cohesion in your teams when you're work? When they are working with kind of what amounts to like incomplete information, or they're venturing into uncharted territory?
Do you have any specific techniques or like guiding philosophies that are working for you and your people now?
Suzanna Fowler: First thing I would say, with the pace of change that we have going on, change management in organizations, while sometimes ignored is actually a really important, function within, , any organization that is,, trying to accelerate their innovation strategy, making sure that they're focused on.
, How they're bringing along the humans as we drive the, the innovation. , The other piece that I'll say is, clear and transparent communication out to the audience on [00:08:00] wins or learnings. , Generally the best practice right as you're going through, , an innovation strategy is that you're, demonstrating wins very early in the process.
And they may be small, but you're demonstrating them. Wins can also be learnings. , Hey, we did this and it didn't work. Here's why it didn't work, and this is how we're correcting, and then moving on. To show that your strategy around the innovation , , is sound and that, you did 10 steps and one step to the left didn't work, and so we're taking another step to the right.
, The good thing that we have within at and t. To help build that credibility is building those communications both with, internally with our employees, that communication and infrastructure, , , to share with them those wins and externally with our customers and our shareholders. , That the investment that we're making in AI , is.
Impacting the customer experience, , and we're returning investment [00:09:00] to shareholders for the investment there. That coupled with the sophistication of the technology that we're implementing at and t. , Some of the AI tools that we manage, , have the highest accuracy in the industry.
And I think that's actually gonna be a differentiator as we continue to see, , ai, mature in business use.
Chris Wofford: Andrea Eppolito, I heard you, , and heard you visibly sort of nodding to some of the points that she brought up, which is communicating wins. Mm-hmm. Talking about learning opportunities and so on.
How do, how do you think about this within Simply Fed, for instance.
Andrea Ippolito: Yeah, and in particular we were talking about the learning opportunities is wins. I just like was like vibrant during that because that's one thing that we know from research is that organizations that have strong psychological safety, IE feeling comfortable raising problems or learnings, they just do better.
And it's because you're [00:10:00] learning along the way. And so one of the things we talk about in our organization, and we are a startup, so we have. A slightly higher risk tolerance, but I also know from times in large organizations and in government organizations, they had the same posture as well, and those are the teams that were most successful, is that we like to think about if there's a mistake, that's okay, bring it to the surface so others can learn.
Reid Hoffman, who's the founder and former leader of LinkedIn, he always talks about, I expect my team to make mistakes 10 to 15% of the time. And you know, we're a healthcare organization, so there's certain mistakes we don't wanna be making, right? We do a lot with maternal mental health screening. Those need to have a hundred percent connection to care.
But a lot of what we can do, we can be iterating and learning along the way. So we had a team member two weeks ago. There was an issue she faced, she made a mistake, she brought it to our all hands, , the week later and we talked about it and it was just like my heart was bursting. 'cause I was like, this is exactly what we need to be doing.
Someone else is gonna make that mistake and [00:11:00] that's okay. And when you're innovating and you're at the pioneering edge of what you're doing. There are gonna be mistakes. So you have to celebrate those learnings along the way. And I think a lot of organizations don't have that psychological safety yet.
But if you're gonna have that intrapreneurship culture, you have to, mistakes are gonna be made, but you have to learn from them. You don't wanna be making it twice, but it's gonna happen. And so don't push it to the side.
Chris Wofford: Andrea, I wanna stick with you for a second. So you have, a dense and pretty rich career.
What was it like moving from a corporate space to a leaner entrepreneurial startup space? You've talked a little bit about this moments ago, but I wanna ask you if there's like continuity in how you approach and how you encourage innovation. Proving and validating concepts across, industries.
. In your experience, I'm thinking about our viewers who are either established and thinking about doing things differently or moving across industries. Any advice on that?
Andrea Ippolito: Yeah, and so in general, , well, I was listening to a podcast earlier this week and they were sharing some examples of organizations [00:12:00] that, , they innovated the most when they were in periods of down times.
And you know, everyone always talks about the adage of, , necessities, the mother of invention, but holy moly, is that the case with startups? But that's been the case with most successful innovation organizations, facebook had a down round, and they talk about actually that scrappiness that you create during those times actually forces you to think about what is the problem we're trying to solve using first principles, and let's be really thoughtful and creative of what that looks like.
That's something that as a startup, I mean, we are incredibly scrappy. , And it forces us to think about, , what's the most efficient and effective way to meet this need of the families that we have the privilege to serve? What do they actually want? And that's actually where the really innovative thinking comes in.
And that scrappiness comes in. And by the way, when I worked in government organization, the same thing would apply. Maybe the budget hadn't been approved yet. Maybe there was a government shutdown and we weren't even [00:13:00] allowed to work. So that same principle does apply no matter what size organization there is.
Chris Wofford: This is to you Suzanna, what specifically has at and t done to involve employees in innovation? Or, what's the communication?
Getting all hands on deck kind of approach at at and t. And here's part two. . How do you balance people's time commitments between the operational activities, running the business kind of stuff, and actually driving innovative changes? So can we talk about the communicating, getting everybody all hands on deck part first?
Suzanna Fowler: Our leadership team at at and t is heavily invested and talk about, and not every meeting, but almost every meeting, how we're, investing in technology and AI to improve the customer and employee experience. So, as we go through that, it's a top down effect. And then , we work in every organization to build infrastructure to communicate to our employees that, , the importance and of [00:14:00] the, continued learning around AI so that we can have every employee, including our frontline employees,
Participating in the innovation strategies that we have. , We're also enabling the employees to learn about the tools that we're providing for them, that's, self-made curriculum on our ask at and t platform. , So the majority of our employees that have access have real targeted tactical strategies based on their persona to implement for their daily work and inspire them on how they can create new use cases, , as they learn.
So that's, that's a big one. And then as we go into our leadership team, making sure that, they are educated to a level that not only do they understand AI to a basic degree, but that they're, at the point where they can, , understand [00:15:00] how to apply AI solutions for. Business problems that they encounter in the operational as far as balancing, time executing on their day job and investing in growth.
, It really needs to be. Sponsored, , commitment from the organization and alignment, for the type of change that we are, implementing across the organization. And then. As individuals have come up with kind of own unique needs on how they can learn, having a supportive leadership team so that maybe they're doing, you know, , I've done all the things that are provided that get me to like general education.
I work in a part of the business that I would like to have some specialized education to help serve our customers., Making sure that the leadership team is supportive, which they, they absolutely are. So it's encouraging the employees to, , self-help and identify [00:16:00] those activities that will help them transform their operation and that top down.
Support and enablement and in some cases requirement to get you up to, what I'll call like minimum operating speed for technology innovation.
Chris Wofford: Very good. How do you think about this?
Andrea Ippolito: Well, I just wanna pick up what you just said. I love that. So it, we talk about like MVPs minimum valuable or viable product,
a lot in innovation is what's the least you need to build. And you know, a lot of what I focus on now is the operating side. And so I just love what you just said there about creating this minimum operating rhythm there. And it's true, just trying it on for size and seeing it, how it works, and then building and scaling from there.
With the expectation that a lot of what's gonna happen at first isn't gonna work as well. So I just wanted to highlight and underline that point in particular. I thought that was very thoughtful.
Chris Wofford: Perfect. Right. Back to you, Suzanna. So I want to ask you, you handle impact assessment coordination for the business ops team at at and t.
Just to [00:17:00] reiterate. Mm-hmm. How do you measure or demonstrate success, internally, while keeping a line and focus on those North Star business outcomes that you had, , alluded to earlier. Are you running around with specific like, key performance indicators, KPIs, or is it not quite that simple?
Suzanna Fowler: Beyond the financial investment, this kind of takes me back to my thing of, , we make sure that we're hitting the business outcome, the customer experience, and the employee experience objectives that we have. There's no like one size fits all, , methodology for every proof of concept right now.
Because of the way,, early wins in AI have been automation. , This next wave is reinvention of business process, how we serve the customer, and,. I think between that and then we have the employee adoption as another factor. , We also partner really closely [00:18:00] with, we have a business agent Foundry for our at and t business team.
So it's a unique partnership between our technology organization, our value creation office, and our business operations team to create this little sphere of, innovation team, kind of like your center of excellence, , within at and t business so that we have the right engagement model and support, with a customer centric mindset.
Chris Wofford: I want to ask you about,, I think you'll appreciate this one. So , I was thinking about the Reid Hoffman, 10 to 15%. I fully expect to see that failure rate among my people. So with rapid AI deployment super fast, like adoption things, don't, , always go as planned. We can make huge departmental mistakes and misfires.
Any advice on how to pivot? , We're using pivot kind of lightly. Let's talk about like outright failure, , throwing a serious wrench in the gears. How do you deal with these kind of things when things just aren't working? Total failure. You've gotta think [00:19:00] about how to, how to pick up the pieces, how to keep morale going, how to reconfigure the team to get the thing done.
, How do you respond to failures within your, under your purview? Suzanna,
Suzanna Fowler: I'll hit two. So one, , , you should be setting such aggressive, , targets that, you aren't you should be expecting to fail, right? Your target is so aggressive that you're at 90%, , we're aiming for the moon and with Andrea's example, and we may not hit the moon, but we're aiming for it.
, And so their corporate culture and, , not at and t but I think in general, , we said we're gonna go meet, 70% and we're gonna hit 70%. What we're saying is we're gonna aim for a hundred and we may land at 70. We need to make sure that we're pushing ourselves our 75% because we are pushing ourselves to be as aggressive as we possibly can, as fast as we [00:20:00] can.
And if you don't set an aggressive target, you're not gonna be as fast at really pushing the envelope as fast, how fast you can move through innovation. So that's kinda the first one. The second one is, , like radical pander, I think that that cultural tenant is really important in an innovation space.
, Call it what it is, , be honest, you know, there's that everybody talks about failing fast, but sometimes. You fail slow, like it just depends on how fast you're moving with your, program, but, , the radical candor that accompanies that so that you learn from it is the important part.
, And that's both to your team and up in the organization and in a large organization like ours.
Chris Wofford: Can I ask you, so radical candor, does that mean allowing people, , safe space to, to talk openly and frankly about. Pretty sensitive issues.
Suzanna Fowler: , Yeah, and, , failures, it can be as like as simple as [00:21:00] the tool AI tool adoption.
Hey, we pushed this new tool out and it really doesn't work for the organization, and here's x, y, and ZY, and you just accept that that's what it is, and develop a plan to pivot.
Chris Wofford: You talked about risk commercial a bit. Communicate along. I wanted to kick it over to you in response to that.
Andrea Ippolito: Yeah. Well, in full transparency, what I'm gonna share, we've completely stolen from Brene Brown's book.
So over the summer we had a retreat and we all read this book and we talked about what are the different cultural norms that we wanna create. So in the last few months, we've been able to use. These, , different recommendations that Brene Brown had. Okay, so one is just building on what Suzanna just said, is when there is an error, when there's a mistake, when something goes wrong, what we've done is we call it a rumble.
, Alright, we need to get everyone in the room. Let's figure out what we learned here and try to identify potential root causes here. But in the spirit of, let's find a way to learn as fast as we can [00:22:00] because we do have these very aggressive goals and we should be shooting. And by the way, we're a startup, so I always like to say we are, we are fast-paced, we're high growth.
It is, this isn't for everyone, but I, I test for that in their interviews because that's one of our values. And so early on, if you want people that are gonna be down for the aggressive goals, to Suzanna's point, you need to test for that upstream. As part of the interview process to ensure that they are ready for it in the spirit of Taylor Swift.
, But what we do is create rumble. So if there's an issue, if there's a failure, we call it rumble in capital letters. And then we put the topic. And what that means is we all get in a zoom or room and we talk through it like, Hey, what went wrong? And it creates this safe space. To be able to talk just openly with radical candor of what happened here.
And it just gives permission, even though you shouldn't need permission, but it gives that permission just to work through it. And then the second thing is we try to remove blame. And so one of the things we like to say, who's on first for solving this? [00:23:00] And it's no one person's fault. Usually it's a systems issue,
it's process over people. And so another cultural norm we've created is taking ownership who's, who's got the ball, who's on first? Because then that allows if the person. That maybe had a bigger role to play in. What happened there? They don't feel like they dropped the ball and you know, they're crying in the bathroom.
No. Like this is a, this is a team loss, so to speak, and we're all learning together. And so who's ever taking ownership going forward? Just establishing that and it just gives permission to actually take a step forward out of the failure. And we found those two cultural norms have really changed the game with our culture.
Creating that psychological safety, but also feeling like people didn't. Like totally dropped the ball. It just, this was a team loss. Now let's all solve it together and move forward.
Chris Wofford: , I wanna get inside , the process. , How do you test for Rumble responsiveness upstream while you're doing an interview?
When you're doing an interview, what do you do? What do you do?
Andrea Ippolito: So whenever you're doing interviews, so one of the things I have a coach by the way. , I [00:24:00] highly encourage folks getting a co. At first I was like, what is this? I love having a coach 'cause she helped me work through this. But it was like we identified our company values and our organizational values.
Then we identified specific questions that we would ask as part of the interview process, and maybe it's an internal transfer of team members across business lines, whatever that looks like. So you can use it in all these different places. So. One of those questions is that don't let good be, or one of our values is don't let good be the enemy of perfect.
Right? And this aligns to a lot of what we're saying. And so just like everything you have to test based on behaviors and past examples. And if I ask that que, can you tell me about a time, , that you didn't let good be the enemy of perfect with specific examples? And they are speculating or they're saying something superficial.
I was like, oh, like I can think of 10 examples right now off the top of my head of times that I've been able to innovate and be at this leading edge and not like good be the enemy of perfect. If they're struggling to think of a really [00:25:00] meaningful, deep example, then that's like a sheer fire, like yellow flag.
And then as you do your reference checks too, you can ask those same questions to those people you're doing the reference checks to. , So that's one example, but you always have to ground it in real examples because if you ask them to speculate on behaviors of how, how would you act in this situation?
That's easy peasy. You want real meaningful examples from past careers or past roles.
Chris Wofford: I'm trying to rumble ready our audience here. Yeah. That, that's what I'm doing.
Suzanna Fowler: I love it.
Chris Wofford: This can be taken within the context of AI or not, but how do you ensure with all this innovation going on, , rapid innovation that you're encouraging, , how do you ensure that you're aligned with whatever corporate governance you have going on, that you're operating within the guardrails, that you're remaining compliant, that you're maintaining ethical standards?
Lots to juggle there, but we haven't talked about it yet. So, Suzanna, how do you think about this?
Suzanna Fowler: As large of an organization as at and t is. , Thankfully our leadership team, , had a [00:26:00] centralized gen AI program at the kind of burgeoning of that. And that combined kind of the financial investment program tracking and the alignment with governance.
. At and t has taken a really strong position on responsible ai, for our customers, , customers, trust us with a lot, and we take that responsibility seriously. And so instead of having multiple organizations all running in separate directions, we centralized and communicated that early as the, we saw kind of the future of where.
, Gen AI and AG Agentic was going. So, we built that program and streamlined it. That was actually my last job before I was in this role. And made it , as. Easy for all of our business users across at and t to, , use as possible, , while still maintaining kind of all of those ongoing responsible ai [00:27:00] checkpoints.
, Our CSO Rich Baich would say that, , from a security perspective, , it's the same muscle that we use for all of our other technology. It's just expanded , to include Gen, AI and agentic. So, , I think we expanded existing best practices for, an agentic world as we go through that.
So I think we did that alignment and balancing that kind of centralized governance with inspiring and allowing self, support across the business so that we're not slowing down innovation. , One of the other benefits of having that corporate view and such a large organization is making sure that,
tying back to kind of our ROI that we see those common patterns across capability development across. The vastness of at and t and we are building common capabilities for multiple use cases, making sure we get the best ROI, but also that we're working as efficiently as possible and we are providing kind of a [00:28:00] unified experience for our customers.
They don't have it for the same capability. They don't have a different experience depending on a product or channel that they come through.
Chris Wofford: Is there anything that she said there that resonated with you?
Andrea Ippolito: Yeah. Yeah. Especially when you're talking about your CSO. And so when we're thinking about AI in our organization, we're a healthcare organization, so similar.
You have to make sure that you have the highest level of integrity, that you have those checks and balances. And so what I like to work with a team is like, , what are your concerns? What are your blockers of moving forward with, say, agentic AI offering? And what we do is we put in those guardrails at first when you're first deploying.
So for us, as an example, if we're using agentic AI and we're working with patients, we always have a human in the loop still because that allows us to build the confidence, by the way, build those, that muscle and that rhythm. And so I love that. You brought in the, points of your in our, what we call a cso, your [00:29:00] CSO, because oftentimes those folks, and in the innovation community, people don't like to bring them into the fray.
And it goes back to what I was saying earlier. You can't be so separate then your operating with them. But if you actually bring in those folks, and especially find the folks that have that a more innovative posture. There's so much interesting co-design you can do surrounding those blockers early to put in those guardrails, and then in our case, keep that human in the loop.
And then once you feel more comfortable and those practices are created, then those guardrails can start to come off in this agentic AI world that we're all living in now.
Chris Wofford: What is your playbook for securing leadership buy-in? I mean, it's in many ways you represent leadership, but thinking about it, how should one go about that?
Andrea Ippolito: Well, I always like to give the example of when I was at the Department of Veterans Affairs and we were creating our innovators network there. So, I was given the biggest gift, , in the world when I started that initiative because our, the secretary, so the government's equivalent of A CEO said.
Andrea go out [00:30:00] and talk to veterans across the country. And so I traveled the country for several weeks and understood veterans' needs. Then he said, okay, we have no hope of improving the veteran experience unless we improve the employee experience. Now go do the same thing with VA employees across the country.
And so I had this very rich. Qualitative data set at this point of all the needs of our ultimate customers, which are veterans and their families, and now our employees. And then I marry that with our psychological safety data. 'cause we were measuring it. I said, here's what I'm seeing. I have now the quantitative data from our psychological safety.
And what I'm seeing is that folks need an outlet. To develop ideas, test those ideas with frankly, a high failure rate with veterans' needs in mind. And so with that, we developed this whole initiative called The Innovators Network, and we created a mechanism called Spark Seed Spread where they got a little bit of funding to test the ideas.
And then those ideas, we expected 70% of those initial ideas to fail. And the ones that didn't fail went to the seed [00:31:00] level, and they got a little bit more funding we expected. You know, half of those to fail, and then the next level got to spread. And so what you're doing is you're creating this culture of risk, but also resourcing it.
And identifying competencies along the way. And then what we did is we went out to all of our regions and we got executive champions across the 23 different regions. And so then when I went to senior leadership, , and I talked about this, I'm like, I have 23 of your senior leaders across the country bought into this.
I've created this mechanism. Here's the KPIs. How can you say no to that? Right? And so you've established the buy-in from your customers, your employees. You've then got your middle management involved. So you've built it bottoms up.
Chris Wofford: So based on what she just described, , any commonalities in there for what you're seeing at , at at and t Suzanna?
Suzanna Fowler: I, If I look at what is coming down the innovation pipeline now, , for business operations, , the kind of, obviously always data-driven exercise to make sure that we're, investing in the right places, , but [00:32:00] also making sure that we are taking all of the,
interviews, side byside with our frontline employees and our customers, , and coupling those together to, , prioritize what's in the pipeline. The other thing I would say is, , I think getting that leadership. Buy-in is the first thing with that package.
And then proving it fast. Like not, not, Hey, I'm gonna deliver you something in six months or 12 months. , I'm gonna deliver you something next week, like very, very fast. , Proof that what your theory is can be actualized.
Chris Wofford: , Andrea, I want to, I wanna turn to you.
Suzanna Fowler: Did I freak you out with the next week comment?
Andrea Ippolito: No. I, I love that been by the way. I think that was so right on just over communicating the wins along the way. That is the best way to get buy-in.
Chris Wofford: , I want to ask both of you in sequence, Andrea, let's start with you. So , can you describe some qualities or skills that might, enable or empower our viewers to [00:33:00] become better intrapreneurs themselves?
Or leaders who should be, that can position themselves to be, more encouraging and innovative and cultivating a culture of entrepreneurship within the organization.
Andrea Ippolito: And so I think it, some of the themes that we've talked about to underline and summarize is, one, start with your customer's needs and make sure you have those very crisp and crystal clear.
Then start with your employee's needs and understand what's gonna be the best way, what's gonna make the most impact, so that they have a very positive. Employee experience surrounding innovation. , Third is you have to find your partners in all the different parts of your operating engine that can help you usher this forward, whether that's your CSO, whether that's hr, whoever that is, find your partners in that operating engine along the way.
, And then the last thing is be very clear and put it in a box and maybe a box with dash lines. I'll say. Of like [00:34:00] what you're gonna start with and then deliver it urgently aligned to whatever organizational goal that ties to, because people wanna see ties to KPIs. So one of the new products that we've built that we just pushed out, we've been able to show that this, , very dramatically improved our conversion rate
Very dramatically for our partner that we work with in this improved, , their reduction of cancellations and improved their shipment rates. And those were KPIs to Suzanna's point they were able to show within a week. And that just gets that buy-in faster and then people wanna work with you. And by the way, to do that, we made a ton of mistakes.
It was very aggressive. It was very urgent. And everything wasn't perfect, but going back to you can't let good be the enemy. You're perfect. So just create that culture of just putting something out before it's ready a little bit too early, because then you need to get that feedback so that you can iterate and then put it back in and it will be back out and it'll be much better the next time.
And you keep on iterating and. From there. And so don't be [00:35:00] afraid to put something out before it's ready. And in fact, there was a quote, I forget who said it, but you should be a little embarrassed when you put it out , because it's not perfect, and that that definitely is something that we've taken internally to do.
Chris Wofford: Suzanna Fowler, I see you nodding in agreement. Any comments on what Andrea just said?
Suzanna Fowler: Yeah, I just love the, speed and, , the comment around , you should be a little embarrassed, in that , you should feel some discomfort when you're moving at that speed. And when I think about skills that are needed, , there's a grit that's required to be able to tolerate that type of discomfort.
Over a period of time that is very important for our innovation drivers. And whether you're in a startup or you're in a massive corporation you need that grit because, it can be very challenging to sustain. And there's a whole bunch of different, strategies to build grit.
Angela Duckworth has a [00:36:00] great book about it. , But I would say kind of maintaining customer focus is the first one. Grit being the second one. , The honesty or radical candor. , when you're moving at that speed, there's not really time to sugarcoat anything,
, Just say what it is and then what the solution is and, and move on. The last thing that I think is really important, , and we talked about this in the pre-show a little bit, was self-awareness around change. , I think self-awareness is gonna be more and more important on how you learn.
What type of learner are you? , How you deal with change? , As we continue to accelerate the pace of change for everyone. We were using this internally the other day can you imagine the example of everything that you interact with digitally has an update daily.
There's some, , UI changes, there's a new button, , that type of pace of change. How do you react to that? [00:37:00] That's a good gut check for yourself on like, holy cow, if everything I interact with, digitally right now, changed every day, how would I feel that self-awareness and then applying strategies on
how to deal with that for yourself based on, on your unique needs is really gonna be important.
Marcus Terry: Thanks for listening to Cornell Keynotes. If you're interested in learning more about Professor Ito's innovation Strategy certificate program from e Cornell, check the episode notes for details. Thanks for listening and subscribe to stay connected with Cornell Keynotes.