How Do You Make Innovation Happen?

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman the wrong way to make Innovation happen Tai Haggler says in this week's special bonus episode is to have a great idea and then go all in trying to create it that he says is a really expensive way to find out if your idea works the right way to pursue Innovation he says is to take your idea to customers so you can assess the pain points and opportunity spaces before proceeding Haggler who is founder and CEO of trig an innovation and design firm in North Carolina also says he's learned that the problem with focus groups is that the more people you have in the room the less valuable the conversation tends to be in fact he says oneon-one is best he also says that brainstorming remotely can actually work better than in person oh and by the way if your mom tells you she loves your idea and will definitely buy your product as soon as it's avail aailable she's probably lying even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations brought to you by our sponsor the great game of business will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report which Inc magazine named the best newsletter for business owners and which you can subscribe to for free at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews this podcast episode is titled how do you make Innovation happen welcome Ty it's great to have you here tell us about the work you do okay thanks Lauren I one I appreciate the invitation to come on uh so yeah trig is a industrial design consulting firm uh in my background I've got an undergraduate degree in industrial design from Georgia Tech and we predominantly hire Industrial designers but also Visual and ux designers and having that focus on just kind of the tenants of good design which is really about uh like making sure that the uh the adamin and the bits the the hardware and the software create a cohesive experience for the end user that's delightful that solves meaningful problems and so we work in a couple of different Industries predominantly Healthcare as we think about physical devices in terms of like what the physical devices you might experience in a healthc care setting uh then also getting into digital experiences and so we've found opportunities in other Industries where the same lessons that have applied in being successful in healthcare Innovation have also applied in other Industries how did you come to specialize uh in the healthc care area was that by Design or did it just kind of evolve that way I started out at Home Depot in their in-house house Innovation department and uh was there from 2004 to 2008 and the two 2008 housing crisis uh kind of made things difficult to do anything in Innovation and Home Improvement and I was starting trig about the same time uh so along the way I was also going back to school to get my MBA at NC State University and one of the programs that they offer is called the product Innovation lab and so they pair designers with engineers with NBA students so as a team we worked on designing a device that helps people who stutter to track incidences of stuttering and so along the way it was my first introduction to it got exposed to it and became absolutely fascinated by the field and then just kept on seeking opportunities having colleagues in the industry who would trust us to take on an aspect of medical device design and that we've continued to make further in Ms it has had to be very intentional there are a number of barriers to entry getting into healthare and medical device design particularly when you comes to FDA and Regulatory and reimbursement and all the documentation that goes into that but at the same time it's also been some of the most rewarding work that I've had a chance to participate in in my career because you know it's it's life-saving equipment at the end of the day if it functions properly and so it's just the stories that come back for it are so much you know so much different outcomes than say one more consumer product I think you said that you have branched off into other uh Industries can you give us uh a couple of samples of those yeah um so the durable equipment Market particularly um agricultural equipment has been one area we've spent a lot of time working in uh commercial mowing equipment has been another uh and then even you know the complexity of building materials manufacturing and delivery to job sites has been another industry that we've worked in and what's been interesting particularly from the building construction standpoint I found that it's harder to innovate in building construction than it is in healthcare you would think that Healthcare is one of the hardest places to innovate you probably have clients that are quite large what's the range do you also work with like solo inventors correct we will work with um aspiring entrepreneurs and uh all the way up to you know Fortune 500 companies that you know really have a much more narrow ask for us so the fun thing about working with startups is that they are all in the work you're doing for them matters they have skin in the game and so regardless of you know kind of whether or not we've made the right decision it's still going to Market we're going to get a chance to test it and see how this plays out where I think in larger organizations you tend to cycle through a lot more options before something actually makes it to Market and so the feedback loop that you get working with startups is um probably much faster so one example of this um there's a Founder we worked with a mom who uh had been designing a product for her kids uh which was a playable jigsaw puzzle had sensors on the back and so it would play a sound depending on where you would put it on the playmat and so she had been working with a engineering professor at a local University and had gotten it to a certain point and then came to us and was basically asking for help to get to the next stage and she didn't yet have enough funding and so rather than take what little bit she had available had guided her towards applying for Grants and pivoting and so then she was able to win a rather substantial sttr Grant and then was fully able to fund the initiative and then get to that next stage in part because she was you know both doggedly determined to make her idea work and also willing to Pivot and accept feedback and guidance can you give us a sense of the size of uh trig uh yeah so trig is a um let's see we've got five full-time employees a number of independent contractors that support us so it's not a a large Company by any means but as a value shop each project we take on is unique and so the core skill we deliver is being able to offer asymmetric upside to where um we're working on projects that have potential to scale up to solve Big Value problems for our clients and uh yet also our own business model doesn't scale very well because it's dependent upon kind of each day showing up and being as creative as we possibly can to solve each unique problem that comes our Direction so it's an interesting business to be in how do you price your services uh so we prefer to price based upon the value that we can deliver for the client and usually that depends upon the nature of the problem we're looking at if you're trying to judge creative work by time put in it runs contrary to both the mindset of creativity but then also like the end of the day you're looking for a better creative result not how much time did you spend thinking about something because creativity comes in flashes it doesn't come like a I don't know a peace rate uh you know type of thing where like you know today I pumped out you know 500 Widgets or 500 ideas rather it's yes we we produced 500 ideas but only two of them are the ones we're keeping so it's almost better to have more people looking at a problem who have varied subject matter expertise rather than to have one designer staring at a problem for hours and hours and hours it's a different economics when you're dealing with Innovation creativity and you know asymmetric upside for scalability I'm wondering how difficult was it for you to walk away from a salaried position to to start your own business and dive into this full-time one I was very grateful for Home Depot so the story going into Home Depot was I came in as a Olympic hopeful athlete so I had done well enough in the 2003 world championships as a Flatwater kayaker and had qualified for home Depot's Olympic sponsorship program and so my role within Home Depot was one where I was supposed to be an athlete working in the stores and then training full-time and you know working part-time and so my role at Home Depot was always kind of provisional and temporary and then I then wound up you know like making a pitch based on the sponsorship of my uh manager uh for an idea for a new product that got some interest and excitement that led to the creation of an in-house Innovation group uh which was you know like it was trying to create a world-class Innovation group within a large company and trying to train for the Olympics it was a little too much ambition and that's a that's a pretty big leap going from being an in-house athlete to creating a division essentially yeah yeah it was a wild time in my life it was a lot of fun but it was also uh entrepreneurial and moving from Home Depot to starting trig was more of a continuation of the same I just had more autonomy with how I function and more risk a lot more risk absolutely um I've been fortunate that my wife has a a stable more stable career than me and so she's been able to smooth out the bumps as I've been like kind of learning how to run a business over the years what did you have to figure out about running a business I mean just sales to begin with is like the first thing you have to figure out because we're going hungry and you got to rely on being able to get out there and pound the pavement make things happen and so that's kind of the you kind of think about your growth as a as a you know kind of early entrepreneur and then over time is kind of figuring out how to manage other people how to put in place say quarterly priorities how to you know Advocate and communicate a vision for the organization how to listen to other people as they're coming on board and really create space for people so that it's not just about you know me and my ego but rather create a space where each individual designer coming in um can you know like see their own professional fulfillment and I've got a couple of young kids and so it's like you're a kid going through the creek and you're you're pulling up rocks and you're just so excited to pull up rocks and look under rocks and every now and then you find something under a rock and you have that excitement of I found something so you got the first emotion of find an opportunity and the second emotion of okay well do we want to eat this because I then have to go back to the team and say hey guys look what I found under a rock here and then there's kind of the skepticism of like is this client going to be a good match for us is there a good you know fit for us here and so probably not a Perfect Analogy but um I think that describes the emotion at least of um Business Development and trying to make sure that you're doing a good match between the capabilities we have versus the problems and opportunities facing a potential client do you struggle at all with how much time you have to devote to that sales process versus uh time you can devote to actually serving clients early on where you don't have as much of a portfolio and the website is usually the last thing you have time to work on early on sales is such a lift um it's just required to get going but we're fortunate to have had some great projects we've worked on and we're able to Showcase and in our own kind of professional uh website tri.com to show off some of the great work we've done and that also we've got enough of the reputation in the market that um we don't have to do as much sales or I don't have to do as much sales as had done previously and it's much more about opportunity curation and so that's been nice to have people come to us rather than have to be you know pushing that out there I think one of the great things we've had has been a podcast that I've been running with my co-host Jared Gabon and so that's been an awesome opportunity just to highlight some of the stories of you know Healthcare innovators and get to learn from them and give appreciation and it also is a nice way to give to the community and a way that you know if if there's a good fit it has our name out there and then if there's a reciprocation that comes back that's been a just a great um I don't know way to give to the community and then um you know also just kind of you know find potential matches are there things that drive the success of the business that you've had to come to understand I think if I'm not doing a good job of accepting the right types of clients then it rarely gets better I think we went through a period where we had like I think like four challenging clients all at once and it just was bogging us down for growth because we were you know basically troubleshooting poor fits and just having to get through what we had agreed to and deliver on our commitments and then kind of take a sigh of relief and then go on to uh the next phase of it so you know there's nothing that's a permanent uh bad decision fortunately but it does take time to get through and realize the consequences of so I think being more choosy has been a definitely a lesson learned for me um you know over the past several years and so we're trying to be very diligent and intentional about like which clients we choose to work with so that we can make sure that we're delivering on our promises and adding Great Value do external factors have a an impact on your business whether it's covid or the economy or anything else you know the funny thing about Co is I took trig to be a fully virtual company in 2011 and so along the way at first we were kind of you kind of doing the like kind of hiding it thing where we're like you know hey yeah I'll meet you at the office and you go run over to like a rent office bace and then eventually started owning it of like you know what the only time we're going into an office uh because most of our work is done digitally through 3D CAD or you know design software and so we've been able to function as a dig as a remote firm for a while so when the covid shutdown happened we had a you know full 30 person ID a session that was already planned to be run remotely through digital whiteboard software it was around a physical product and so we didn't miss a beat in fact we had more of the um company employees from this large company Who U attend the session because they were just trying to figure out which end was up and here's this new thing called a you know digital ideation session and what's been interesting going through that methodology process we found that in certain circumstances that type of remote ideation is more effective than in person that's so interesting yeah and part of that has to do with um a principle called production blocking uh so if one person is talking you're blocking the other person from generating ideas and so in a remote context you're making it so that you know we call it heads down heads up where we set aside specific periods of time with very focused challenges and ask each subject matter expert to spend you know 10 15 minutes focused on a very specific problem generate as many ideas as they can and then we then come heads up to socialize the ideas but it allows for the introverts on the team to be just as I guess productive in terms of generating ideas as the extroverts so you have a much more well-rounded um and kind a higher performing Creative Group if that's the focus now I think postco when we had the kind of Revenge vacations and you know kind of that rush back into the office then I think there's been much more of an emphasis on team building and culture building which has you know taken that back to our roots of facilitating these as in-person experiences which is great but I think we've had that flexibility through those es and flows you know we've been in a sustained period of growth uh for a uh you know I'm a Perpetual pessimist in terms of the economy and part of it was just founding a company in 2008 which I guess that'll do that to you I'm kind of waiting for the other shoe to fall you know they say that's can be a very good time to start a business because if you can survive then when the economy improves you're in great shape yeah well I mean it we had an extinction level event locally where the two major design firms here in North Carolina basically either went bankrupt or exited the local market so wow that wound up providing it's like you know when a tree falls in a forest it allows for New Growth to happen I think was a beneficiary of that um but at the same time you know like that also has been a I don't know a warning sign for me that like that also could be the case if you scale up too big in a business like that and you're too vulnerable to um shocks in the future how important is growth to you um I think it's the right kind of growth because I've become more aware of the risk of growth through just adding people and trying to do the the time and materials I think growth through creativity though is a more interesting pathway that I've been scratching my head meaning if we can be more creative in terms of the value we can deliver to our clients where they're seeing exponentially greater growth as a result of working with us that's more interesting to me than trying to have a super galactic death star of like you know kind of have all the designers in the world working at our company it could be much more about having specialized designers who have a commitment to craft where we believe in the value of good design to deliver outsize value and then that's something that I'm perpetually interested in and trying to figure out how to grow through I guess just delivering more value as opposed to just kind of Topline revenues do you have a goals in mind do you think in terms of targets by a certain period of time um yeah I mean I think the model that I'm most enamored with is called a venture studio so you think about um invest like Venture Capital um really tends to step out of the operator seat and really just look for you know kind of late stage startups that already have some sales they just need some cash to scale up whereas as designers we tend to specialize in that zero to one of taking going from nothing to something and then we could even go from like one to 100 and get to more of a scale up so for me I've been interested in that Venture Studio model where we're helping to originate different startups where we believe there's a scalable opportunity and yet also having the humility to recognize that you we're not Elon Musk here we you know aren't going to be the ones to take it and scale it up to you know something that's a full-fledged company company rather wanting to pass the Baton off to you know like aspiring CEOs or you know Season CEOs who were looking for that next growth opportunity and don't have the patience to go through the zero to one phase and so that's the model I've been increasingly interested in and you're seeing a trend that has happened when I first started looking at Venture Studios a couple years ago it seemed like they were fairly uncommon and then you're starting to see like you go to you know your different investment uh forums and whatnot it seems like every other group is uh setting up a venture studio so it's um it's definitely an early stage Trend you see out there but I can see how in a maturation of what we're doing that's a logical progression for you know like kind of being more of a venture designer as we uh as we mature does that suggest that you have or are open to taking uh investment dollars in trig and also curious whether you ever trade your services for an equity position uh in a client one I think uh it trig is um trig itself is uh you know it's it's not set up to take investment um it's a you know it's a cash flow business but I think from a venture Studio standpoint it would need to take investment now on the flip side um I think as we have looked at you know basically Sweat Equity deals or trading you know equity for reduced services I think that we have done that in the past and the rule of thumb that I found is that uh startup Founders who are willing to give up Equity too quickly don't understand the value of it and therefore don't know how to create good Equity versus the founders who understand the value of equity oftentimes are very reluctant to give it up and those are the ones where you want to take Equity so it's a it's a double-edged sword there where it's it's like a Groucho marks thing it's the want to be a member of any club that would have me exactly and so you kind of need to be there at the ground floor to make sure that those starting conditions for Success are there um you know if you're what what's the expression if uh you don't have a seat at the table you're on the menu it's like trying to you know set it up to where like we're we're setting the table to start with and inviting people to come sit down and then being able to hand it off so that we don't have to stay at the table but at least we've we've had a chance to be part of the founding so that's an area that I've been perpetually interested in and trying to find the right path forward with it it sounds like you go Way Beyond simply designing uh products um or devices you you're you're not just taking somebody else's plans and executing whatever they ask you to execute you're getting involved uh if I hear you correctly in thinking through all sorts of ramifications and you know moving much more in the direction of innovation I'm curious was that the intent all along and and how do you make that leap from I don't know what the right term would be but just this the design aspect of design to The Innovation part of it yeah I mean I think it's it's a matter of how much responsibility do you want to take over your work because if you purely if you narrow the scope of what the role of design is to say just Aesthetics like making pretty pictures like playing with crayons whatever um then you know it's a narrow scope and so you know if you build up your scope to where you're looking not just at desirability but feasibility viability then you're starting to look more broadly at what are the implications to the business model part of why I was interested in getting my MBA was just to understand the language of finance and strategy and marketing to really have a more broad sense of the scope of innovation beyond what my formal training was in product design and it blew my mind how much went beyond what we learned in studio going through the NBA classes especially went through case study methods where I was learning about new product launches and you know reading these long case studies and from designer's perspective to have design be like maybe a sentence or two in an entire process was just eye openening for me and so it's very helpful to understand the context because I'm at the end of the day I'm interested in effectiveness of our work so to answer your question about how do you transition between design and Innovation I think it's design is a subset of innovation and it's a matter of how much more broadly do you um go into that space when Innovation itself is multidisciplinary it's not any one function within an organization rather it's best if it's cross functional because you know in this day and age if an innovation could have been accomplished by one function it would have already been done by now and so you need that perspective from a lot of different stakeholders in order to deliver effective Innovation and so it's more of you know making the assertion that design has something meaningful to contribute to Innovation and we teach that through a methodology that's commonly understood as design thinking um I like to to express it more as empirical creativity of you know creativity and service of trial and error looking at what works running low-risk experiments to see how the humans will respond to a new stimulus you know we're all familiar with examples of innovation that occurs you know kind of like a lightning strike there's a certain amount of luck being in the right place at the right time you're trying to in a sense Force Innovation make it happen could you maybe walk us through an example of that you know what's a good approach to making Innovation happen um yeah I mean I'll start with the wrong way to do it excellent uh which is usually when we talk to like a first-time founder they get an idea they get excited about the idea they go file a patent for it so they they're $155,000 in the whole and and then they get the patent accepted and they start now trying to figure out well what do I do with this patent now that I have it and they're so um hung up on that first idea that they've gotten that they're you know then deciding you know what we're just going to push everything into this and then we're going to expect that this is going to do really really well so we're going to get the most expensive tooling so we can scale up on our first pass and then get all the way to the finish line and realize nobody wants to buy their idea even though they've sunk a lot of money into it which is you know basically it's a really expensive way to find out if your idea works or not that all makes sense right so that's the wrong way to do it or the least efficient way to do it we'll say that by contrast you could go through and spend the majority of your time trying to make sure you're understanding what customers actually want so go through and use empathy um empathy the observation techniques to really make sure we're understanding what are the key pain points what are the opportunity spaces so we have a more clear understanding of where those gaps are that then becomes your North Star and then generate lots of ideas to then see do any of these actually match the problem that sounds like a marketing function I mean do you do focus groups we we did those early on in my career at Home Dep and I learned a lot from focus groups um I found that there's an inverse relationship between the quality of the conversation and the number of the people in the room meaning if you've got three people in a room you've got less depth of an of a conversation than two people and a one-on-one um an individual uh discussion is much more value added than say A you know broad-based focus group because you just have that agreement that goes across the board and it's up to the facilitator to use research techniques to try to make sure getting original prompts from people but usually that's a heads down exercise and it's it takes more skill to run a focus group to get the economies of scale out of it but usually I'm much more interested in trying to get to a an a deep Insight that can come through more of a an informal discussion so my favorite book to that effect is called the mom test by Robert Fitzpatrick and he has this great analogy that if you go through and ask customers if they like your idea they will lie to you just like your mom would lie to you about thisbook app that you're coming up with like oh sure honey I'd buy this i' buy this app from you and then you go through and build a cookbook app and nobody buys it and because your mom was lying to you because she wanted to not hurt your feelings and so from a research technique standpoint it's great because you you are more interested in past behavior and what people have actually spent money on in the past versus anything that's a future focused question or you know kind of trying to ask people to speculate on the future which is not useful at all from an innovation standpoint I didn't mean to Sidetrack you with the question about focus groups but it did strike me that you're getting involved in a lot of different things that we don't traditionally think of as design well I mean it's it's a key input so the two inputs to good design are the research the customer insights like do we understand the customer problem and have we asked it in the right way just getting a survey result that says here's the demographic profile of the people that responded to this isn't helpful it's asking research in the right way there's a couple of techniques that I'm a fan of also another key input for good design is brand if we're working with a company that has no brand then trying to design for that company is much harder than if we're working with an established company with an established brand then we can fit into their visual brand language smoothly and we've got a you we've got a key Target to work towards so those are the two big inputs we have to be aware of and um you know is a key part of running a successful design program it's interesting you would rather work with somebody who has an established brand than somebody who has a blank slate where you would perhaps have more freedom so uh there's a quote here with creative freedom it comes from lau and the D Ching where it's uh not the pot itself but it's the emptiness inside that creates that makes it useful and so this speaks to um basically the analogy that creativity is like hot water if you don't have constraints on it then you pour it on the table it just makes a mess that goes everywhere but if you have a teapot and then you're able to put uh some tea into it you can have a nice cup of tea That's creative bounded and useful and so I'm a big fan of putting constraints in place so if there's not a brand we run a brand process to help establish the brand get it going and make sure there's enough of the brand in place to where the product launch is cohesive so we want to make sure that the product and the identity the website the messaging the vision for the company are all cohesive because the end of the day the brand is about making promises and keeping promises and the product is a key attribute of that you've talked about working with large clients and with working with kind of you know very small companies or individual Founders is there Middle Ground as well do you get established businesses trying to go in a different direction uh coming to you as well yes in those cases um there's more maturity in the functional groups to where uh we can take on aspects of it in some cases we'll you know be responsible for running an aspect of their Design Group um within startups we're kind of you kind of helping to run the entire creative side of their business whereas with middle groups we're more working to solve a more narrowly constrained problem whereas with large groups our scope is even more constrained and specialized and so it's just a matter of matching the gaps in the organization to what we can offer that would add value how many projects can you handle at once you you don't have a a huge team obviously what's a what's a reasonable workload I've been trying to have our workload narrowed down to about 7 clients at a given time there was a point in time where we had ramped up to about 30 different clients but the individual project size was small and that became very challenging to provide consistency and deeply understanding kind of what the mission is for each one of those and to create good value when they're small projects where the value proposition is still being discovered can you teach Innovation so yes you can teach it entrepreneurship I think is harder to teach than Innovation interesting because innovation in its own right uh is a process when you're running it smoothly it requires attention to detail running a set of steps it's kind of like learning how to play jazz where you're running a set of chord progressions to learn how basically whether or not a given IDE a will work and you've got enough Runway and you've got enough shots on goal from an innovation context where you can do that by contrast with entrepreneurship I think that's much more of a personality disorder where you're willing to take obscene risks to go after an idea that you know by definition has never been tried before and you don't have a safety net underneath you well that's not always true when you say an idea that's never been tried before I mean there that that certainly exists in entrepreneurship it's not the only choice right right you can buy franchise buy into franchises and whatnot or or start you know start an individual business that is you know in an industry where there are competitors that do similar things sure absolutely and do a fast follower strategy and come in with a you know better cost structure absolutely I I do think though that um entrepreneurship takes a certain level of I don't know like in individual autonomy and self- agency that doesn't exist very commonly and it does it's it's definitely something that is um it it's a unique personality profile for somebody who's willing to do that um as opposed to I think kind of like where Innovation is much more collaborative by nature and yet also doesn't require so much risk-taking at an individual level that makes sense it does I guess I to me Innovation feels more exotic than entrepreneurship and harder to grasp and you're kind of saying the opposite um yeah because innovation in its own right is um you know really dealing with the new and the novel but it's also something that is adjacent to an existing organization whereas entrepreneurship is innovation plus having to get a whole company off the ground at least is how I think about it my thanks to Ty Haggler CEO and founder of IND industrial design firm trig this episode was brought to you by the great game of business which helps businesses use an open book management system to help build healthier companies you can learn more at Great game.com wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's l o r N2 anyone hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think you can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by Jess thubron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]