50: Simon Hill - 50 Episodes In: Lessons from the Innovation Frontline

50 episodes. 4 seasons. One stubborn question: what does it take to make innovation work? Simon Hill looks back at the lessons so far. 

One stubborn question: what does it actually take to make innovation work? In this special milestone edition, host Simon Hill steps out from behind the interviewer's chair to look back at the conversations, characters and ideas that have shaped the Total Innovation Podcast so far.

From Aidan McCullen and the polyvalent players of Toulouse Rugby Club, to Steve Rader running 850 challenges for NASA with a team of just twelve, to Gina Lucarelli's 90 UN accelerator labs built on "directed improvisation" — Simon revisits the moments that stuck. Along the way he draws out the threads that connect rugby pitches to lunar missions and Faroese entrepreneurs to financial services boardrooms: innovate where you differentiate, know your planted foot, reward the right kind of mistakes, and never assume the best answer lives where you expect to find it.

It's also a chance to reflect on Expected Value, Simon's book on closing innovation's measurement gap, and the central thesis behind the whole series — that innovation rarely fails because of bad ideas. It fails because of bad systems. Part retrospective, part manifesto, this is a reflection on making the invisible visible, and a marker on the road to the next fifty.

Transcript

Intro 0:00

What's up, Marfin? Uh-uh. Uh-uh. Uh-uh.

Simon Hill 0:05

What's up, Marfin?

Intro 0:07

Uh-uh.

Simon Hill 0:08

Uh-uh. Welcome everybody to the Total Innovation Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Simon Hill. And today, well, today's a little different. No guest, no interview is stuck with just me. Because today we're recording episode 50 of the podcast. And I thought it was worth pausing for a moment before we dive into all the exciting episodes coming next to look back at what we've done, where we've been, what we've learned, and what I think so far it all adds up to. 50 episodes, four seasons, give or take, and one big, stubborn, endlessly fascinating question. What does it actually take to make innovation work? So, you know, today's episode is that. It's a little bit of a time to stop and reflect. 50 episodes is a nice milestone. I didn't know where this was going to go when I started it. We've had some incredible guests along the way, shared some incredible insights. And this is just a little bit of a walk through some of the lessons that we've had during those different 50 episodes. In the first episode of the podcast, we welcomed Aidan McCullen on as our first ever guest. And I chose Aidan deliberately. We'd been sparring as friends and adversaries and colleagues in the innovation space for a while. And when those things started to take shape in my head, the idea of total innovation and the podcast, Aidan won as one of the first natural people that I went to. His background as a former professional rugby player and now a best-selling author, an award-winning innovation speaker, the host of the Incredible Innovation Show podcast, and just a great sharp thinker on all of the different parallels and trials and tribulations of what comes out of this broad topic of innovation. And he's spoken to many and most of the big thinkers within the space. I saw our podcast as complimentary, actually. He digs deep into the theory that sits behind this incredible work with some of the sharpest minds throughout time on it. And I wanted this podcast to be a little bit more applied than sort of that, to get into the weeds of the parallels, the learnings, the practicalities of innovation at the grassroots level, in the real world, outside of textbooks, outside of theory, and much more into practice. In that first conversation with Aidan, he told me about Toulouse Rugby Club, one of the greatest club sides the sport has ever produced, and how they built something that wasn't just about winning on the pitch. It was about polyvalent players, about deep culture, consistent vision, and the coaches who celebrated the right kind of mistakes with Bonnie D, the coach would say, even when it didn't come off because the spirit was right. And that's a concept I think we've tried to come back to time and time again across this podcast. The idea that culture isn't a poster on the wall. It's whether people are rewarded for trying the right thing, even when it fails. At the heart and soul of it, that's innovation. Not though, just innovation for theater's sake, innovation directed and achieving new value. And that swept us nicely into the next two episodes where we welcomed in Karl Basler Reader from ExxonMobil. We did two episodes with Kyle because there was just so much richness and too much to cram into one episode. That was actually the top episode of season one in terms of readership. Thank you, everybody. Kyle built an open innovation capability at ExxonMobil from a standing start in less than 18 months, doing something remarkable. He talked initially to about 200 people across the organization, doing five interviews a day and just listening. What struck me from Karl's story was his framework for thinking about where knowledge actually lives inside an organization. He called it levels. Level zero, your immediate team, level one, the adjacent teams around the same function, all the way out to level six, the global crowd, people whose expertise you would never even think to ask. I recommend listening to this episode. It's deeply rich and insightful. Carl's point was that half of his best projects ended in those early levels, not by going outside, but by finding someone three floors away in a different business unit who'd been working on the same problem for 20 years. We have a habit in innovation of looking outward when the answer is sometimes right there in a silo that we haven't opened. I guess the point really here is we don't know where the best answers come from. And the more that we can open up to different perspectives and different viewpoints, whether they're in the corridor three floors away, or whether they're in a different domain and a different part of the world, the answers almost certainly exist out there. And being willing to open up just a little and hopefully a lot can have huge value from an organizational perspective. If we leach forward further into season, into season one, episode seven, we welcome Steve Rader from NASA. And honestly, Steve might have one of the most quiet, of had one of the most quietly extraordinary jobs in the world as he built and ran the Center for Excellence for Collaborative Innovation, CoAC, at NASA. Essentially, he ran open innovation for NASA and for lots of different parts of the US federal government as well. Running 850 challenges and counting with a huge success rate, 90 plus percent, $112 million spent at the time that we had spoken to him in terms of awards and over $170 million in estimated savings just through the process it's let alone, before we get into the benefits of the innovation that came out of it, through a more efficient and a more effective realm of people, but also with a tell a team in total of just 12. 12. That number stuck with me from the conversation because think about the scale and the scope and the size of what we were talking about, but also and how few people it took to run that comparative to what we might be resourcing into many of our innovation efforts across our organizations today. Additionally, Steve shared with us the idea of resistance. Even at NASA, even with rocket scientists who have literally sent humans to the moon, there was pushback when open innovation arrived. Because it felt like someone outside was maybe, or maybe someone inside was questioning the expertise of these deep specialists, these deep experts in their different domains. And he made a point that still echoes, which is if you're not going, we're not going outside, we're not looking beyond the realms of our internal specialists because people are not good enough. We're going outside because no single person can possibly know or track every relevant technology, every relevant trend, every relevant field at the pace the world is moving today. The answer to the challenge might be sitting in another domain in agriculture or mining, completely outside of the thematic and the industry, whether that's space or something else, using different language to describe the same underlying problem. Equally, with over a million new startups a day, it is just impossible for any team to keep on top of that, even with agentic capabilities. Open innovation is a navigation tool in a world that can increasingly overwhelm. In episode five, Stephen Shapiro introduced us to his latest book, Pivotal. And I loved Stephen's central argument that the problem with modern organizations is not that they're not innovative, it's that they're innovating quite often in the wrong places. His central argument was innovate where you differentiate. A phrase or a term to sit with for a little while. He had this language of the planted foot. I love this, a basketball analogy, and that the pivot only works because there's a foot that doesn't move. Most companies, he argued, are so obsessed with the moving foot that they've forgotten what they're standing on, what makes them distinctive, what the world actually values that only they can give. And that sits right at the heart of the total innovation idea that we talk about in the podcast, and more broadly through the thought leadership and work that we do. You need to know your planted foot before you can move with any coherence at all. And if we think about the world of innovation, the world of agentic development, the speed at which we are experimenting today, how much are we doing that with the idea of a planted foot underneath us? A good friend Natalina High joined us for episode six, and she brought something that the rest of the season didn't quite have: a warning. Natalie's a digital psychologist, and her focus is ethics in the age of AI. Natalie reminded us that we're fundamentally meaning-making creatures. We anthropomorphize anything that talks back to us. We did it with Elisa in the 1960s, a simple pattern matching chatbot at MIT that made people feel genuinely listened to. And now we're doing it with systems of incomparably greater sophistication. Her phrase stuck with me, which is don't let the tail wag the dog, a phrase I tend to use quite often myself in a variety of different contexts. In this case, she was talking about let's not start with what's possible and chase it, but let's start with what we as an organization, as a society, as a species, want to do, and then ask whether the tools that we're using are tools that will help to serve that outcome that we're trying to drive. That's not a break on innovation, it's what separates genuine innovation from expensive theater. Another great episode I would advise people to go back and have a listen to. In episode nine, we brought an entrepreneur and a startup into the room, Runa Rystrup, former CEO of Depop and currently leading uh uh Yuno Juno, a man who grew up on the Farrar Islands of 50,000 people, a collection of rocks in the North Atlantic, and built a billion-dollar company. What I love about Runo's story is the diffusion of the innovation angle. He'd read Everett Rogers, and the adopter curve was baked into his thinking from the beginning. When at the start of Depop, nine out of ten people downloaded the app and thought it wasn't for them, he didn't panic. That was the strategy. You build for the one, your target audience, and then the early majority arrives, then the late majority. The nine who said no become your biggest users eventually. The danger, he told us, is when organizations treat that nine as a reason to kill the project. That's how the culture eats the innovation every single time. We posited. Not the startup in the garage, but larger, established, sometimes bureaucratic systems trying to do something genuinely new. A good friend B. Schofield from Lloyd's Banking Group talked about innovation centers as enablements, not a separate team doing cool things, but a function that helps the whole organization find better and the right ideas. Ian Small gave us the story of building a water innovation ecosystem. Balachi Bondilli, formerly of Deloitte Pixel, showed us how a consultancy created an internal startup, literally pixelating the workforce into modular on-demand talent. And Sonia Ferreira of Mesh walked us through how they've built an incredible innovation ecosystem. And then Gina Lucarelli, in episode 48, told us something that really did blow the scale and stopped us in our tracks a little bit. Gina built, and this is a real story, 90 accelerator labs across 115 countries for the United Nations Development Program. Not in sequence, in parallel, all at once. And the guiding principle was what she called directed improvisation. And here's a red line she spoke about, not across, no fraud, don't hurt people, don't steal intellectual property. Pretty obvious stuff. But beyond that, let's figure it out. Let's go out there and do it. That culture of trust and that idea of experimentation within sensible bounds rather than overly restricted, overly bureaucratic. Gina describes sending a teen to Lesotho who went on an innovation walk and found a farmer who'd invented a pesticide by accidentally stepping on a grasshopper and noticing eventually that the remnants of that grasshopper kept other insects away. He'd been doing it for years. He'd seen this for years, and nobody knew. Uncovering these user-led innovations that could perhaps have ramifications and interest for further people was at the heart of the labs that she had built. 6,500 solutions mapped by people who were just paying attention. There's lots of great stories out there. It's also what happens when you trust it is not a uniquely humanitarian principle, it is the most print in the most powerful innovation principle we can all embrace. In episode 10, Greg Satell reminded us that ideas don't fail because it's his message, build your coalitions before you need them. Change takes time, it moves through networks, not announcements. Particularly so, I would argue, in the modern world. Tom Goodwin in episode seven gave us his characteristically provocative view that digital isn't a thing, it's everything. Technology is the new normal. The question isn't whether you're digital, it's whether you understand what the tools you're using are actually for. A great question, particularly with all of the buzz around AI, agentic, LLMs, and everything that goes with that at the moment. Yes van Wulfen on breaking innovation barriers, Dr. Nadia Jacksonbaeva on reinvention, team Bernstein on unlocking impacts from open innovation, J. Shree Seth on innovation thought leadership. J Shree is a chief scientist at chief science advocate at 3M and one of the most thoughtful people we've had on the podcast about what it means to genuinely champion innovation inside a complex and innovative organization. How to build your internal brand and leadership within that setting. And then there was season three, a season that went a little bit of a different direction. It saw me take a step back from interviews for a while and put something personal into the world. In September last year, I published my latest book, Expected Value. And thanks to a sponsor, Wazoku, we ran the full audio version of it across the whole season, chapter by chapter, as a podcast exclusive release. Expected Value was written out of frustration, not at innovation teams. They're some of the most passionate, committed, and incredible people I've had the privilege of encountering and working with. The frustration was at the system, at the measurement vacuum that surrounds so much innovation work. The book follows Freya, a director of innovation strategy at a fictional financial services firm. She walks into her annual review with 37 pilots, 72% offlift in idea submissions, four hackathons, five startup partnerships. And the CFO asks her one killer question. That's great, but what's the value of all of this? And like many of us, she doesn't have an answer, not a real one. The rest of the book is about building that answer. A system called Expected Value, XV, combining confidence, predicted value, time sensitivity, and strategic fit. And an efficiency lens that shows you the cost per point of expected value. So you can compare internal development, external collaboration, open innovation, and everything in between on equal terms. It also helps to see the efficiency of the experiments and the innovation bets that we are placing in a holistic portfolio view. I'm not saying this system is perfect, but I am saying that without some version of it, we're always one bad quarter away from having our innovation budgets cut and our programs quietly shelved. We spent decades building the funnel. It's time that we built the proof. Alex has arguably done more for anyone alive, more than anyone alive, to change how organizations think about their business models. The business model canvas, strategizer, the value proposition canvas, millions of people have used these tools and engaged with this company. And his message sitting here in 2026 was more urgent than ever. The business model is no longer a fixed asset, it's a hypothesis. And the same forces that allow organizations to scale faster than ever can cause a business model to expire faster than any leadership team expects. This is, we both argued, probably the biggest period of business model disruption we've ever seen. You made a point that I found quietly devastating in its simplicity. Most boards of directors still hire a CEO to run a company, not to reinvent it. And until boards start hiring leaders who are capable of doing both, both running the machine and rebuilding it at the same time, disruption will keep winning. I fundamentally, as we will all know, under support that perspective. This dual mandate is blending and becoming more synchronous within itself. And yet it's a thing that almost nobody actually does well. Additional voices in season four. Robin Bolton in episode 42 talked about the value gap, the distance between what innovation teams believe they're creating and what business leaders actually see. Her argument centrally was that most innovation fails not in the lab, but in the handover from the lab. When the torch passes from the builders to the scalers, something essentially gets lost. Is it urgency? Is it context? The belief is that this particular thing matters. And we have to zone in on that and make sure that that handover is effective. Otherwise, we get what we get. And we know the metrics behind that. Martin Erickson and the decision stack, Tom Staley on why open innovation still fails, Marta Jakob on aligning strategy, innovation and AI, Mike Butcher, MBE, a tech journalist and co-founder of the new media firm Pathfounders, talking about tech truth and finding the path through the noise from all of his incredible perspective, but also on building a new media business in this new era as well. All incredible guests, all sharing incredible stories as we go. And then the most recent episode, episode 49, with Samuel Arbersman, a complexity scientist, a writer, and one of the most enjoyable minds I've encountered on the topics that surround complexity and deep thinking. His book, The Half-Life of Facts, is a book I love, and I just had to get Sam on. It is built on the beautiful and slightly unsettling idea that facts have a shelf life, perhaps not unsettling, perhaps obvious. That the things we've learned, the certainties of our fields, the numbers we quote in confidence, they declay sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, at a rate you can almost measure, and nobody sends you a notification when they do. He told me about his grandfather, a dentist, who went through his entire career believing the human body contained 48 chromatomes, because the textbooks were wrong for decades. It's 46. His point, we're all carrying outdated knowledge, not because we're careless, but because knowledge changes. And sometimes our understanding of that knowledge changes more slowly, often for deeply cultural reasons. The expert is sometimes the least useful person in the room, not because they're not brilliant, but because their expertise is precisely bounded. And the answer might be sitting just outside those bounds. This is the topic that I spend much of my career focusing on and actually believe deeply in, as many of you will know. Which brings me all the way somehow back to episode one and Aidan McClure McCullen and the polyvalent player and the power of someone who can operate in multiple positions. At the end of the day, perhaps what we need are greater generalists bounded by incredible specialists, with our focus looking beyond the domain that we are immediately. Immediately drawn to look at when trying to do innovation. And so what does 50 episodes add up to? And you know, talking through these, here's my honest attempt at a synthesis. The thread that runs through all of it, from rugby pictures to lunar missions, from Faroese entrepreneurs to UN innovation labs to financial services boardrooms is this. Innovation doesn't fail because of bad ideas. It fails because of bad systems. Systems that don't know how to measure value, systems that kill the right kind of mistake, systems that reward activity over outcomes, outputs over impact, the funnel over the proven return. And additionally, alongside that, that the answer is almost never where you expect to find it. It might be the farmer in Lesotho, the quantum physicist who answered a NASA challenge about cosmic radiation, the 16-year-old Depop user running a small empire from their bedroom, the complexity scientist who realize that facts expire. The people closest to the problem are often not the people best placed to solve it. The person from outside the domain often sees something the domain expert has learned to stop seeing, or perhaps they were never capable of seeing. And that is the total innovation thesis. It's not a department, it's not a budget line, it is a mindset distributed across an entire organization, one that knows its planted foot, one that experiments rigorously from there, measures honestly, kills gracefully, and trusts in the power of a genuinely diverse, heterogeneous crowd. And so, in closing, I said at the start of this podcast that I wanted to make the invisible visible. I believe there are more brilliant innovations happening in organizations right now than anybody is able to see and acknowledge, and that much of it fails, not because it wasn't good enough, but because we couldn't prove it. We couldn't effectively communicate it or protect it. I hope in some way that the 50 episodes of this podcast so far have helped to make more of that visible. I hope it's given us one idea or one framework or one connection that changed somehow something about the way we think about the work that we do or how we do it. Because really, that's what this is all for. There are many more great episodes coming. I'm committed to continuing with great conversations, greater depth, and bringing more incredible uh evidence to bear from innovation beyond theater to innovation as performance. If you've been listening since episode one, thank you very much. We build a really loyal listenership. If you've just found us, welcome to the podcast. And the back catalog is all there for you. To every guest who gave their time and their thinking to this podcast, I am genuinely grateful. This whole thing is built on your ideas, and I often talk about standing on the shoulders of giants. As always, I'm Simon Hill, and this has been the Total Innovation Podcast. Thank you for 50 great episodes. Here's to 50 great more. Let's keep going. Thank you. What's up, uh uh, uh uh, uh uh. What's up, or uh uh, uh uh