#144—Gina O'Connor: Building Your Company's Innovation Competencies

Gina O’Connor is a professor at Babson College, where she teaches on the topics of Corporate Entrepreneurship and Breakthrough Innovation in large mature companies. Previously, she had a long career at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  

Gina has co-authored three award-winning books on Breakthrough Innovation and published numerous papers in leading journals including Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, RTM and Journal of Product Innovation Management, among others.  

Her mission is to help large established companies learn how to renew themselves through organic growth via game-changing, strategic innovation. She is a firm believer that to be successful, organizations must develop an innovation function, complete with its own people, processes, metrics and culture that operates within the company to translate emerging science, technology and business models into  new platforms of growth that will fuel the company’s future health in spite of itself. 

In this discussion, we fashion our conversation by following her fascinating journey through three distinct phases of studies over years of research—the foundation of her books—that evolved as her research revealed new findings. Our conversation covers more than we can summarize in this short introduction, but among these insights we discuss: 

• What her team’s research discovered are the constraints to innovation—and they’re more often beyond just technical, contrary to what many think 
• The three distinct competencies of innovation—discovery, incubation, and scaling—that businesses must develop, each with different people, processes, and metrics 
• The concept of “domains of innovation intent,”—untapped new markets in which a company can explore and potentially unlock a wide portfolio of opportunities 
• The key learnings leaders should take away from her team’s extensive studies to tackle an often-overlooked component of innovation: talent management 

Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
01:14—Introducing Gina + the topic of today’s episode
03:36—A quick summation of Gina's three books—and the research phases within each one
10:59—The second phase of research and book: capabilities
18:10—A case study that led to discovering "domains of innovation intent"
20:26—The third phase of research and book: talent management
24:07—Flipping failures into a portfolio of opportunities
27:10—Ecosystems as a byproduct of innovation
32:27—How are the concepts of an agile workforce and upskilling interrelated?
36:25—What does a leader need to think about to successfully lead these changes?
40:15—How can people continue learning from you?

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Additional Resources:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gina-o-connor-047b862/
Link to books

Thank you to our guests, thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Transcript

Kaihan: Gina, thank you so much for being here with us. We have been hoping to get you on the podcast world. We've been very, very, very busy teaching, and now we're getting you at a moment where you can stop and share a little bit with us. Thank you so much for being with us.

Gina: Thank you, Kaihan. Yeah.

Kaihan: So there's so much that you have worked on in this area of institutionalizing innovation enabling large organizations to innovate. You have three books and numerous articles. The one that or I was familiar with is grabbing lightning from 02/2008. But maybe you could just sort of describe these three books and sort of what the key takeaways of the three had they build on each other just for us to or yet ourselves. Thank you.

Gina: Yeah. I'm happy to. So the first book was an examination of how do companies manage for breakthrough innovation. And it was, you know, long ago that we started that work. And we really took the project leaders' respect.

And so companies volunteered projects that they believed had the potential to be breakthroughs, game changers in their industry, and we got to know the leaders of those projects as the projects were moving forward or not, you know, in our organizations. And we were able to track with the project leaders and their teams for five years. We interviewed them. So we really, you know, got a sense of the experience that they had and sort of, you know, fighting against the traditional norms and organizations and all the kinds of bumps in the road that they had and the commercial and the successes that they had. And that really kind of allowed us to formulate a little bit of a hypothesis about how organizations might be able to do this better.

And, you know, we started to realize as everybody, I'm sure, in your the listeners here know, you you need to be able to support these things in a different way because they're navigating, you know, uncharted territory. Not only in the market, but in the technology space, in the science and technology space and particularly inside the company. And so that was where we kind of identified that although r and d people will say that, you know, this breaks for innovation space is really characterized by market uncertainty and technical uncertainty, we found these two other categories of uncertainty that really challenged these project managers, and they weren't being surfaced and handled. And that was resource uncertainty, which is, of course, the waxing and waning of budgets you know, across multiyear funding requirements. But almost more importantly was the issue of competency gaps inside the company.

And so an an ability and a willingness to partner and a skill set to partner it with the like, learning based partnerships, the different type of partnerships that I would say today we'd become much more sophisticated about. But the fourth category was organizational uncertainty. So strong commitment and then pullbacks from business units around commitment to receiving a particular breakthrough innovation and scaling it, all different kinds of passive sorts of resistance because, you know, some of these things will threaten correct businesses. And a lot around senior leadership's commitment given that, you know, the environment is constantly changing. External forces and internal dynamics And so it's really that organizational uncertainty that I would say lengthens the life cycle, the development path of breakthroughs in large corporates much longer than probably needs to be from the perspective of the other three categories of uncertainty.

Alright. So that was kind of it about phase one, and we started to draw some conclusions. At the same time, Christian play Christian came out with his big book, you know, the first first book on disruptive technologies And he was basically saying large corporates can't really do it inside. They have to kinda have an arms length approach to this. And over time, this satellite's gonna, you know, take over the mother ship.

And we were seeing it quite differently. And so we were saying, look, this can be built inside the mother ship, and we had seen a couple of our companies were working at doing that. So that is what caused us to do the second phase.

Kaihan: No. I love that. I believe just philosophically and that's why I love about your work. You prove what I want to believe that Christenson and others are describing a problem that some have solved and can be solved, not an innate permanent kind of state or something like that. Right?

Disruption is something we can understand and recognize and designed for.

Gina: And I think, you know, our lens was different from his. Our lens was all around the health of the mother ship organization, ongoing renewal. And I find so many other kind of scholars, but also practitioners that get involved in corporate venture capital funding and other types of arrangements. Are more focused on the health of the ventures as opposed to the consequence on the the organization's renewal. So ours is all about how do organizations constantly renew themselves through innovation.

Kaihan: Yes. That's right. And then sometimes investors, you know, there's some investors I like reading about. And they're sort of, like, even easier to abandon. Right?

Because you say, oh, we'll just sell the company. It shouldn't exist anymore. And we Yeah. I get it. We committed to the longevity and the and and the role of the of of the incumbent.

So then the scope

Gina: Well, we can go and phase this the second book, but first, I wanna just comment on this that at one company, commissioned a little study from me, not my own research. Well, some of it's my own, but what do we know about the financial consequences of investing and doing this from an internal perspective? And I pulled together especially, it was, like, nine empirical academic studies, large sample studies along with what McKinsey and BCG are saying from their benchmarking data and then a number of case studies and have really been able to come up with some data, significant data from unbiased, you know, researchers do it using, like, panel data, you know, large empirical data sets that show the increase in firm market value, stock price, capitalization associated with investments in beyond incremental innovation. So the data exists, and there's even studies out there that talk about how to talk to market analysts about what you're doing as it's going forward. So it'll be it's important for leaders to realize this, I think.

And, you know, I don't think that translates has really occurred out of that, you know, empirical research that's very tedious. 

Kaihan: So I think yeah. I I wanna get to the second book, but but I I also also emphasize as well. I think that a big part of and and you point about this, especially when you talk about resource allocation and where and where resource come from. A big part of the strategic a big piece of the strategic puzzle is investor relations and picking getting the right investors and communicating and managing them. Okay.

Maybe we'll have time to get into that. So next, we go to capabilities here.

Gina: Understanding that, you know, we had arrived at this hypothesis that because we'd seen a couple of attempts inside companies to build this as a capability, not just so we were following, like, a glamour project, if you will, inside these companies, but several of them had an intent to actually build a whole capability around this. So that led to the second study. And it was how are you actually doing this? Because we had formed our own opinion about how you'd have a team, where over or what it would do. Anyway, so that second study we followed, again, there were 12 companies that volunteered into that study, and we worked in partnership with the industrial research institute.

That's an organization of r and d directors and leaders CTOs. And, also, they're now named the innovation research interchange. So it's the same acronym, but, you know anyway, they've kinda helped their game on their name at any rate. So these were companies that had a alert intent to evolve a capability for sort of more breakthrough innovation. And then I started getting phone calls from companies that weren't even part of the IRI that had heard about the study.

And so we had a second set of companies that were about nine. So overall, it was, you know, 20 something companies participating in this. We interviewed the first cohort every six months to understand what was changing. So they had an identified team associated with well, some of them did, but they had an certainly, the declared intent to evolve this capability. So we were watching what was the mandate of that group, and we interviewed the the person who was most responsible for that mandate those to whom that one reported and the people that reported to that person.

Every six months, we did that. And it was all about how many people are on the team at this point. Where are you reporting to? What does your portfolio look like? How are you measuring your progress?

How far along are you keeping the projects until you transition them into an operating unit? All of these what are your metrics? How are you being resourced? So all of these elements of a traditional management system, how is that being designed and, you know, monitored to succeed? And so I would say we learned the most in that phase of the research, and that's the one you've kinda picked up on that resulted in the second book, the grabbing lightning book.

And from there, one of the major insights was it's not just a capability for breakthrough or strategic innovation. It really fell out into these three kind of competency areas. Discovery, and incubation, and acceleration, which is really the scaling. And many of us now have similar terminology, but many people think of those as three phases of a process. But, really, the management system elements have to be designed specifically for each of those because they're very different competencies.

Each one of them operates like a portfolio. So it's not like you have one project, one idea, and it goes from discovery to incubation to acceleration. There's processes for discovery, and there's processes for incubation. And there's processes for it. This the scaling.

And think about the management system. Like, you don't have the same metrics for discovery as you do for scaling. You don't and, certainly, you don't have the same kind of people, even though that was the promise that was given to most people, if you come up with a great idea, hey, and you grow it, you can be the general manager of that business. And we found it just doesn't work. And, frankly, most people all want that, you know, so that but we started to see these differences in the the nature of the skills, etcetera.

Kaihan: So are you saying that some of the skills or I can see some competencies don't translate to the other so that they're they're different competencies. Are there conflicting or in or companies that can't exist together between the three?

Gina: Well, from a individual skill set, yeah, they really are. I mean, the discovery and incubation competencies are are closer in relationship to any of the other two. You do. Okay. Combinations.

So we coined this term of incubation in case you're just starting out and you can't fully, you know I think staff this thing with these very clear specific skills. But that that's getting ahead of the game. This concept of discovery and incubation and acceleration was kind of an interesting insight because we would find the way we kinda came to this was as these companies start had their team you know, the team viewed its mandate the the team's views of its mandate evolved over the five years that we tracked with them. And why? It's because you know, they were releasing the project opportunities into the business unit too soon.

Every single time their budgets would expand, their staff would expand, and they would hold the opportunities longer, and we're like, why? Well, you know, we send it to the business unit and it gets starved for resources. There is still too much uncertainty, and this is causing all these political, you know, issues of, you know, sort of the blame game But, you know, in actual fact, a business unit is responsible for bottom line, you know, top line growth, but bottom line margin. And the place where breakthrough innovation requires the most investment is in the scaling. Discovery is cheap.

I'm telling you it is inexpensive, and incubation is not that expensive. It's much more expensive to not do incubation.

Kaihan: It's much more expensive to not do incubation. It sounds like you've thought about that sentence before. Could you unpack that for us?

Gina: So there's two reasons. One is, a lot of times, they'll come up with a great idea. They'll have an idea jam or a contest or, you know, something, and we'll come up with a great idea and they'll wanna down select to the one that looks the most obvious, the clearest path. The likelihood of a kill on that is extremely high. You know?

And so what we wanna do is generate a lot of opportunities within a space, a problem opportunity space in discovery, and then bring all of them into incubation and start to work them simultaneously because we find some of them merged, they become it comes a much more strategic play if you if you play it like a portfolio. It becomes a whole family of opportunities, a whole business. You know? Right. And we tend to sub optimize those opportunities if we don't engage in incubation.

Yeah. So yep. And so I think I could mention DSM was a company that we were noticing. They actually weren't part of that study, but we became aware of them during that phase. And they had built this innovation center where they actually kept the opportunities all the way through scaling.

And so that was probably the most extreme example of this that we saw, but it's very successful. ESM has 100% renewed itself through its innovation function. 100%.

Kaihan: Can you describe DSM, the the business.

Gina: Yeah. So it's a it's in The Netherlands. You know, it's a Dutch it used to it it stands for Dutch State Mines. They were a mining company a hundred and fifty years ago. Today, they today, they're a bio based company.

They have evolved several times, but they there was a chief innovation officer. Rob and Wayne was his name. He came up on our radar, and we got a hold of him, and got it. She has to start to interview him even before I met him before we even started the third phase of the research, which is where we really dug into them. But they had they had formulated this concept that they called emerging business areas.

It's what I now call domains of innovation intent. So they're kind of, like, big problem opportunity spaces that the company commits to. They're as well as future focused. And when we started tracking with them, they had five Ebas that they were working on in their innovation center. And today well, one of them turned out, you know, to not be strategically relevant after a while because of all the pivots that occurred.

Another turned out to be more incremental than they expected, so they sort of fast tracked it into a line of business. And then through a CEO change, there was a slight change in their strategy, and so they sold one, their advanced solar, EVA. And now they've sold off their other operations, and the two remaining ones have become basically their mainstream businesses. It's absolutely fascinating. Is it?

Yeah.

Kaihan: Okay. So we've got these capabilities that allow us to do all three things. And then with your third book, what is that then that next order problem that you address with beyond the champion?

Gina: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're exactly right. Each phase of this research was triggered by what's the barrier that we're observing, you know, you know, what's the barrier to success that we observed in the previous phase? So of all the elements of the management system to support the new stream activity in comparison to the mainstream activity, that's kind of how I think about this now.

The single biggest surprise to us, it wasn't metrics It wasn't resourcing. It was talent management. And to make a distinction here, it was not about the technical community, the r and d people, it was about what we'll call the new business creation people. And so there is more around punishment in their career path than there was about rewards. And so, you know, these are people that you might consider champions or entrepreneurial types.

But every you know, a lot of what we started with was from r and d or corporate venture capital arm, and we'd start talking with these people. And we would say, who are you depending on to help you move this forward? Who else are you helping? You know? And then we'd ask them who are you helping to move this forward.

And so they there'd be people who kind of volunteered to partner with the inventors, if you will, or the technical community or the CDC scouts generally who will many of them have PhDs in technical areas. And so these are people that are much more like new business creation type people. And I draw a distinction between entrepreneurs or even entrepreneurs. And new business creation people. These people have such pride of belonging to these companies, these brand power companies.

They take great pride in realizing that there are so many knowledge based resources inside their company. I've got many quotes to say, I could pick up the phone. You know, I can call whoever I want, you know, in this organization and get an answer. And so the the power of internal, informal networks is highly correlated with strategic innovation success in studies that we've done. Okay.

But the point here is, you know, there's a lot of kind of sad stories about people who did, you know, partner up to help create these opportunities to do the incubation kind of work, if you will. Where if any particular opportunity hit a wall, or did they from a career standpoint, that they'd be put in the redeployment pool. They'd be we talked with people who came in with a cohort of MBAs. You know, they were Harvard MBA people, and this guy went to the innovation side, and this guy went to an operational role. And the career path upward was very uneven.

Kaihan: Yes. I got you. I gotcha. Because the the the the failure rate of these innovations is much, much higher.

Gina: Yeah. Or the learning rate.

Kaihan: Yeah. And the and the learning rate. Yes.

Gina: Mhmm. But the other thing is that Incubation can take quite a long time. And so if, you know, you've got to pass certain milestones to get to for not just first revenues, but like a path to profitability. This could be a five to ten year window and everybody else is getting promoted every other year. Essentially.

Kaihan: So I wanna correct what I said. I just wanna point out. You just corrected me. I didn't to be a little, I get that correction. I said the failure rate, and you said the learning rate, and what you're saying is viewing the failure as a learning opportunity as opposed to defining it as a failure.

Is that is that what you're pointing to? Yes.

Gina: Exactly. And that's what having this domain of innovation intent allows us to do. What we're trying to what our attempt to do is to create put a stake in the ground in that big problem opportunity space. We just don't know how it's gonna play out yet. So you try this thing.

You try this thing. And in a traditional, you know, stage a process or whatever that each of those would be called a a failure, but this is determining the strategy or play strategy in this big problem space.

Kaihan: So let me I'm I'm gonna say it in my own words. So we're taking all of these different experiments or trials and we're putting them all grouping together and we're calling this a domain of innovation intent, and it's like investing in a stock. If we invest in a diversified portfolio, that portfolio may be successful even if the individual investments aren't all successful.

Gina: Right. So you think about a huge, you know, opportunity space that's kinda future forward, and you think about all the ways our organization could play in that space. And there are many. You know? We worked with Grunfolds.

For example, that was a Danish company. They they make water pumps. And so they went through an exercise of creating these domains of innovation intent. And you know, they're very compelling and energizing statements and really kind of narratives. And they even turned each of theirs until sort of a cartoon graphics.

It it just pauses you to spark your creative juices. And so one was decentralizing water treatment, for example. Yeah. Another was future homes and living in China, which by that they meant, like, densely populated urban areas. And the third was zero impact commercial buildings.

Those were the titles, but you can imagine the narratives and how a company whose job is to move water around. And start to think about all the ways they could so each one of those just opens up the the creativity. And it all of those become opportunities that you kinda chart in discovery. And then in incubation, you gotta start trying them out. And testing them out.

And, eventually, a strategy for this business emerges.

Kaihan: And I love it's it's very much an outside in versus inside out as our friend George Day advocates for. And I also see that it opens up a kind of a perspective sort of, like, ecosystem or market or collaboration as opposed to pushing this this device into homes. Right?

Gina: Completely. And exactly. And that goes back to what I said about resource as one of the main categories of uncertainty. So now you've gotta reach out with partners that you've never had a relationship with before and develop a trusting relationship for how we're gonna learn together and create this market space together.

Kaihan: Yes. So and you yeah. And you I mean, you talk you you've you've talked about written about this this market space and creating the market space and that companies often under invest in in developing that market space. How's that playing out now?

Gina: Well, it's still happening. And I I think primarily because many of these quote breakthroughs start in the techno technical community. You know? And so what we find is that companies spend a lot more attention on developing a technology, you know, as as you said. But what we also have to create is a market.

All the infrastructure for the market, the ecosystem for the market. Who does who's gonna do what? As far as degrees of freedom on a business model in a value chain, that all has to get negotiated. You've got a lot of degrees of freedom as far as that goes. So, for example, as we were talking earlier, I'm working with a company now that believes they have like, they do have a technical breakthrough on how we move to direct current and make it safe and usable and sustainable from alternating current.

You know, so it's a huge play in the energy market that will be around sustainability, around cost, or, you know, and mostly and around safety. And so they've come up with this or they're you know, that has been invented. And they're wondering why, you know, sales aren't taking off. Well, you know, there's just so much that has to get done to remove the fear of the threat to the current players in the value chain, and to make it worth their while to be willing to switch, and In some cases, it will never be worth their while, and so you're gonna have to replace some some of these. Well, this takes as much money investment of resources as the technical development does.

And in fact, I've seen in other instances like a Texas instruments or analog devices, some of the projects that we follow, it can take more money than the technical development. And it's not just the money. It's the skill sets and the competences and incubation and acceleration. To do that.

Kaihan: Yeah. So I'm thinking going back to the the mindsets and capabilities and perspectives, I think that's that's gotta be very different. Right? Like, we just had on the podcast of professor from Harvard and someone from Blue Origin talking about the emergence of the space industry and kind of liking it to the emergence of the Internet industry or the automobile industry. And so at the beginning, you have maybe one very expensive point solution, but then you need people to build the roads, build the charging stations, build the all the infrastructure create interoperability.

It's a very different a very different way to think of innovating that.

Gina: Well, but it's true. So and those two cases that you're mentioning, you started out de novo. You know, like, there wasn't anything to replace. Now in a lot of these cases, I guess this is disruption, and you you we're on the offense. It's like, you know, we're creating this but the benefit to society is enormous.

Kaihan: And Yeah. Machiavelli said the innovator has, for enemies, all those who have done well under the old bro model, and lukewarm defenders and those who may do well under the new, and that creates this. So have you looked at that? Would you would you what's your advice for overcoming that natural kind of protective barrier? Is it disruption again?

Gina: Well, in those cases, you are the disruptor. Right? I mean, we we need to be humane about it. The the this is why I'd say, you know, this future forward conversation. I worked with companies who have gone through an exercise with me with creating these domains of innovation intent, and then they some of them don't wanna tell anybody.

We need to tell them. We need to tell people. We need to we need to talk about the future. And this is, again, why the the bigger, well known mature companies can really, you know, lead the way on some of this. And so it gives people time to adjust and time to start to figure out how I'm gonna operate under the new model.

Kaihan: How I can thrive under the new model?

Gina: Exactly. And there are companies that do very, very well in terms of kind of taking care of their people in in this. And even today, I mean, I'm not a huge advocate of everybody, like, moving jobs every six months, but the market for employment is a lot more fluid than it used to be. You know? We're not looking at one ads in classified ads in the newspaper, and you'll under you you know, there's all kinds of approaches to a more fluid.

Kaihan: Yeah I wanna ask a follow-up question on that. This is a little bit self serving because we're gonna get to be with you in New York in a few months from the time of this recording, and also we're gonna be with a firm called Heidrick and Struggles, which is a talent firm. And what they're gonna be talking about is sort of the agility of talent and the flexibility of talent. Can you unpack that for a little bit for us? What what why are these two things dependent on each other?

What is Yep.

Gina: Well, you know, this idea of upskilling and rescaling, obviously, it's becoming increasingly important just from a disruption point of view. And I, you know, I I don't know the extent to which companies feel a responsibility for that, but I do know several who do undertake a responsibility. And some of them are family run businesses and a little bit more of a patriarchal or matriarchical culture, if you will. Who are get it very engaged in the local communities. And when there's going to be a rescaling or outskilling, they start working with the local communities and help create those connections you know, Starbucks was at one point really famous for doing this, saying to the their folks, we don't expect you to be here any more than two years.

So, you know, get yourself trained up and these these sorts of things. So I think you know, that's a really important aspect right now within and may you know, maybe you don't wanna go in this direction with us, but within strategic innovation, we find the opposite. We find that individuals are expected to do the whole thing, and it's almost on a volunteer basis. And I'm, again, talking about the new business creation kind of person. But the recognition that, you know, these skill sets are different and people get stalled in in a career path is also not good.

And our statistics, our data show that when people leave an innovation function in a company, In some cases, they go back out into a mainstream, you know, business unit, but they don't do very well under those circumstances. And in the cases where they leave the company, almost 90% of them end up working in another company in their innovation function. So it's extremely important that we try to recognize that this talent is important talent for us and how do we kinda, you know, select, develop, and retain these people because it's you know, right now, they're kind of a rare bird. I don't think they will be once we really start to diffuse this concept that, you know, you can have discovery people and incubation people.

Kaihan: Great. Great. As opposed to water pump people and engines people. I gotcha.

Gina: Seem quick.

Kaihan: Got it.

Gina: We we've seen people, and you probably have two in the work that, you you know, you come across a lot of people in this area. They're fungible across, like, technology spaces or markets that they they learn and kind of absorb these things very quickly. Well, they're very good at doing, like, in this this discovery types. Are it spotting different opt opportunities and thinking current and thinking future. At the same time, it's incredible.

It's incredible. And incubation people are just very good at designing really clever tests to learn the most for the least amount sunk cost. Incredible. No. So

Kaihan: Yeah. And I could see how that also points to a different way of thinking of certainly career paths, but also what what a role is or what an expertise is or what do you learn, like, you know, curriculum in schools. Excellent. I I love is that you have such well thought through kind of frameworks that point to a whole myriad of changes that need to be made. And it's probably gonna be at the top that you can make these changes.

Right? Because you can see how the systems the pieces of the system kind of interact. So talk to us talk to the leader. What does the leader need to think about or do or maybe who's leaving it to be in order to effectuate this change?

Gina: Well, I thanks. That's a I think that's a really important question. One thing that we've kind of noticed is well, most people who are in top leadership roles in large corporates today have succeeded in their careers through the world of operational excellence. You know, in the mainstream. And so we're we're kind of a generation or two removed yet from people who have really experienced what we're talking about today.

Because we just our companies haven't had the staying power for new ventures groups or, you know, any of this. We we're just you know, we know a lot more today than we did even twenty years ago. But in terms of actual practice, we're still, you know, I think experimenting a lot. So from the there's a challenge when you try to put together a leadership council, you know, I'll call it an innovation council. To who who what we want need them to do is to think new streams of growth, and that means thinking future, and that means thinking possibility where, typically, our leaders think about probability and risk.

You know? And so it's all around risk mitigation as opposed to opportunity and that's I mean, in our brains, we we train our brains to be more, you know, deducted in our reasoning, quick decision making, and those sorts of things. And so this is kind of the next frontier for where we're going, which is how do we start to help leadership teams or a subset of the leadership team come to grips with this concept of domains of innovation intent and how you might form formulate them for your organization. When when it it really kinda take takes a different type of thinking. And then how does that team who who know one another very well?

They are generally, you know, coming up through their organization. They've known one another, and they have a dynamic between them. Among them, how do they need to behave in the world of the creation of the new streams with one another, but also then with the teams that are bringing for the learnings from within each domain of innovation intent. And I find that it's a really different dynamic. And so I think there are some I I don't know what it what you would call it, but learning or kind of reframing and exercising a part of our brain that we're not used to exercising at the leadership level.

But it's so important because we can create all kinds of programs and hackathons and contests and try to you know, get ideas from the bottom up. But I found after twenty five years of watching this, breakthroughs don't happen. The seed of it can happen. But and unless you've got leadership support and, like, evangelization around this, you're not gonna get the commercial fruits of this.

Kaihan: Gotcha. Yes. Lovely. I mean, if we could spend more time we're we're reaching the top of our time with you. I love how many times in this conversation you said, this thing that we call it, this thing that I believe that when you don't have a name for something, then you are having a conversation kind of on the edge of language.

It's not yet named, and that's really what I get a lot out of your work that you are. In that discovery phase at that very front end, that fuzzy front end. And so thank you for doing that work for us and helping us reach some clarity. People who want to continue learning from you and following you on the edge of this pursuit of this thing, how could they continue to stand touch with you? Certainly, we're gonna recommend that they buy all of your books and then prolific prolific writer as well.

Yeah.

Gina: If you haven't sessions, that's a good thing to do. Yeah. If you wanna do yeah. One of the books. Yeah.

Yeah. Just LinkedIn is the best way.

Kaihan: LinkedIn. To

Gina: get in touch, I think.

Kaihan: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Gina, I know this is a shorter than it it deserves, but thank you so much for sitting down with us and unpacking your work and your future work with us, and I could see profound implications for organizations and workers in society.

Thank you.

Gina: Thank you very much for having me.

Kaihan: Thank you to our guest, Gina O'Connor. Thank you to our producers, Karina Reyes, and Zach Ness, our editor, and the rest of our team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

We'll catch you next time on another episode of Outthinkers.