Handwriting, Hype & The Future of Innovation with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and MileZero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and today we have a brand-new format. If you've been listening to the podcast for the last eight or nine years, every week I bring in an amazing guest to talk about innovation. I thought we'd try to mix it up and innovate on the format itself. And for the next few weeks, we're gonna have a guest host.

My guest host is Robin Bolton. She's been a guest on the podcast a couple of times in the past. She spoke at our Inside Outside Innovation Summit in 2022. She's the bestselling author of Unlocking Innovation, founder of MileZero, and a good friend. So, Robyn, welcome to the show. 

[00:01:03] Robyn Bolton: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here and co-hosting. 

[00:01:06] Brian Ardinger: We need to innovate. We need to eat our own dog food. So I figured after all these years of interviewing amazing people about innovation, we'd mix it up a little bit, and every week we'll try to bring you some insights into innovation from what we've seen in the field and use it as a way to get your feedback from the audience as well.

One of the things we thought about is to talk about innovation and what we're seeing, and so one of the things we do, both Robyn and I publish a newsletter, and we're constantly running into new information sources and new people, new insights into what's going on. Thought the first thing we're going to do is talk about the article of the week or what we've been reading.

We have both called together a, a couple of different articles to start the conversation. Since people may not have heard you on the podcast in the past, why don't you give a short intro of how you got into the innovation space and some of your background? 

[00:01:58] Robyn Bolton: I was lucky enough to get into the innovation space kind of as it was forming, which now saying that makes me feel very old, but coming straight out of university, I went to work at P&G and it's when they were doing the very first iteration of creating new products and new brand teams.

And so straight out of school went into a brand team that was working on a new business, and that new business eventually became Swiffer. I got to experience the life of a corporate innovator and all the scars and all the great stories that go with it very early on.

Then, you know, a couple meanderings later, you know, meandered into Arkansas, the Walmart sales team meandered up to Boston to get an MBA, meandered over to Denmark to work for a big consulting firm. Then I ended up back in Boston and had the pleasure of working with Clayton Christensen at his firm. Spent almost a decade there working across a ton of industries, tons of different types of organizations, but always on innovation.

Then, about six, seven years ago, went out on my own, started MileZero, and you know, have continued the innovation adventure since. 

[00:03:15] Brian Ardinger: We've talked a lot about some of the past things that you've done and the ability that you have to work across different aisles, to work in the corporate innovation space from the trenches. I think a lot of people talk about innovation, have seen it in various formats, but not necessarily the depth and the breadth that you've seen it. So that's where I'm excited to have you as a co-host on the shows. 

[00:03:35] Robyn Bolton: Thank you very much. I'm really glad to be here and talking about all this because it's a tough time out there for innovators. You know, whether you're in a company, you're in a startup, you know, you're an entrepreneur, it's tough times and there's always a way through. I think we're relentless optimists, maybe sometimes delusional, but relentless optimist. So it's great to be chatting about it. 

[00:03:58] Brian Ardinger: One of the articles you sent over was CNBC has come up with a Disruptors 50 List, the top 50 disruptive companies out there.

[00:04:06] Robyn Bolton: Anyone hears a list of innovative companies and immediately our heads go to AI and CNBC delivered on that. You know, their number one disruptor is a company that's actually in the military and defense system space using AI. Number two is Open AI. I mean, it's just all the usual suspects, but what caught my attention was that ther