The Innovation Brief
The Innovation Brief features conversations with innovation leaders exploring the ideas, challenges, and breakthroughs that are defining our future.
The Innovation Brief
Innovation Without a Playbook, with Dirk Ploss, Beiersdorf
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Innovation Without a Playbook, with Dirk Ploss
In this episode of The Innovation Brief Podcast, hosts Wil Benton and Gabi Matic speak with Dirk Ploss, digital pioneer and Associate Director Early, Innovation at Beiersdorf, about what three decades of building at the edge of the possible actually looks like, and what it teaches you about innovation, transformation, and getting things done.
Dirk shares how his early career in advertising shaped a resilience that carried him through founding startups, leading e-commerce transformation before the term was widely understood, and driving innovation inside one of the world's most recognisable FMCG companies.
The episode also explores:
• Why emotional transformation is the hardest layer of any digital or business transformation
• What founding four startups (and watching two of them fail) teaches you that success never could
• How large corporations can move faster than startups when aligned around a shared goal
• Building teams that tell you the truth, and why that is the most important thing a leader can do
• Why most productivity systems fail, and the DIRK framework Dirk is writing his next book around
• What it means to operate without guarantees, and how to keep building anyway
• The difference between doing the right thing and doing things right
At its core, this conversation is about what innovation actually demands of the people who practise it: not just tools or frameworks, but character, the capacity to tolerate uncertainty, hire well, and stay curious when the path runs out.
So, as organisations face pressure to transform faster than ever before: how do we build the resilience, the honesty, and the long-term thinking that real innovation requires?
Follow Dirk Ploss: linkedin.com/in/dirk-ploss
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Welcome to the Innovation Brief, the podcast where we have real conversations with leaders driving meaningful change across diverse sectors. I'm Will Benton.
SPEAKER_00And I'm Gabi Matic. Each episode will bring you insights from innovators who are shaping the future for bold ideas, fresh perspectives, and transformative work.
SPEAKER_01Today we're joined by Dirk Ploss, a digital pioneer who's been online since 1985 and has spent nearly three decades at the intersection of innovation, marketing, and technology. From his early days in advertising and founding his own startups to helping transform one of Germany's largest retailers from mail order to e-commerce to a decade at Beiersdorf running entrepreneurship programs and early innovation, Dirk has seen the full arc of the digital revolution from the inside.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the podcast, Dirk. Great to have you with us.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. It's great. It's great that you're here. And I'd like to start at the beginning, as we often do. You know, you started your career in advertising. So creative directing, copywriting, campaigns. How do you think that creative foundation has shaped the way you think about innovation today?
SPEAKER_02I think the one major takeaway that it can really bring to today for my early days of my career, I think that's resilience. Because being in a creative as a profession means that you're constantly producing ideas, and 99.9% of all these ideas go directly into the dustbin. So I think just getting used to it to have way more ideas than we'll ever see the light of day, I think that's the one thing that really is somehow paved the way for the rest of my career as well.
SPEAKER_01And um kind of building on the creativity and kind of coming up with ideas, is we touched on in the introduction, you've been building companies and doing e-commerce since before most people knew what that actually meant. What were the kind of the early days like? And what did you learn from operating in a space before there was a kind of a playbook or a rule book?
SPEAKER_02Who yeah. So um that's a very good question. The things that I learned is that we have always been sort of in transformation, right? And um, especially back in the days when when I was that with the mail moderator company, I was there when for the first month ever, the online revenue was larger than the catalog revenue. So that was really the tipping point of the whole business model that was existing till that day. And so what you really need then is transformation and transformation management. And I think what's really important here is that you have to realize at some point that it's not only digital or technical transformations, it's just the top layer. Indeed, there are three layers to any kind of transformation. That's the technical one. Below that is the business transformation that you have to do as well. So that's exactly, for example, when you change your business model from being an offline business to an online business. But the most important part is the emotional transformation. Because all of us as humans, we do not really like change that much. And if it's radical change, even lesser. And so taking people along that trip and really making sure that there's something to look forward to and that the future will be better than the past has been, that's always the most difficult part in any kind of transformation.
SPEAKER_00That makes a lot of sense. And I can imagine that being particularly difficult to navigate in a space where it's new, it's happening for the first time, and there isn't much to, you know, uh Google, look out for, or you know, be inspired by? Maybe one follow-up question on that then. If you remember back, was there ever a time when you kind of hit a wall and you weren't sure how to proceed, and you maybe don't have didn't have anyone to ask for advice or where anyone to turn to. How did you build that opinion or judgment for what to do next without having any precedent? What did you do?
SPEAKER_02That was a very good question because that that happened to me quite frequently in the past. Um, you know, somehow in in my life, I have developed a tendency to be just a few years too early with most things that I do. And so when you try to sell somebody an idea and it's a new idea, so it has not been done before, everybody is asking for guarantees or how can they be sure that this is going to be successful? And you have to honestly tell them, I don't know, because nobody's done it yet, or I haven't done it yet. So I'm not sure if this will work out, but we will try to figure it out along the way. And I think that is exactly what I always did. I tried to figure it out. Uh so I think most of the bizarre mistakes that I made all started with a simple sentence, and that sentence goes, Oh, how hard can it be? So, and because in my mind, usually, okay, the things look quite clear. And it really should, okay, yeah, um, this must be the process that we have to follow, and then we'll figure it out how to be successful. Turns out sometimes it worked, but more often than not, it did not. So this is why two of the four startups that I built failed miserably, one already after a year, one went very well for five years and then crashed. Now, but still, um when you do not have any anything, um, you know, uh a given path, it's a very common feeling to just feel completely lost. Because when you are at the very front, there is no path that you can follow. You have to build yourself. So you don't know where to go, yeah, and you have to figure that out while you're going.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And I guess it becomes even more important to try to build a network of friends internally, champions who trust in the process.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. And uh especially friends who tell them to tell you the truth. Yeah, so because and that not only for tr uh for friends, but also for the first um hires that you have, the employees. Yeah, so I always try to get people on the team who can do most of the things way better than I can. Because uh I'm good at overseeing things, I'm good at imagining things, but I'm not as good in actually doing things. So I need people that I can trust there to do them right. Uh-not to do the right thing, that's usually my job, but to do them right, that's their job. And also, if I'm wrong, which happens frequently, I'm always happy if one of my employees, co-workers, colleagues, or anybody else says, Dad, you're wrong. So that that's not gonna work. Well, we tried that before and it didn't work, because that is really how progress then is made.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. I mean, it's it's a nice kind of segue into your kind of larger corporate career. So you've spent more than a decade at Beiersdorf, which is obviously a very different context from the scrappy startup life. What kind of drew you into such a kind of a large established FMCG and taking your kind of innovation and startup experience, what's been one of your or uh your largest surprises about driving innovation internally, uh Corporation?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. The funny thing is that's a twofold answer here. So what brought me into Biestoff is simply that they were looking for somebody who had a certain experience with e-commerce and also was able and willing to help their customers, so the retail companies, Auchan, Tesco, Carrefour, and so on, to develop their online business. And so I had that experience which I could bring into the company. This is what brought me in there. But once being there, I discovered that this is an ideal place for me to really thrive. Why that? Because contrary to popular belief, not all corporates are always acting at the speed of a sedated sloth. Some of them can be pretty fast, especially when it comes to innovation management, or when it's simply the time to do things. Then these corporations can move very fast and sometimes even faster than, for example, a startup. Why? Because what you do have in a larger corporation is a lot of resources, and you have a lot of colleagues, and you have a lot of brains that you can work with. And if you bring all of them together and they are going into the same direction, there's high speed and high power. And that is something that really surprised me because uh looking at the outside and large corporations, like bias of is, I was really always thinking, oh my god, these behemoths, they are so slow and they're always lagging behind. Turns out, no, they're not. So sometimes you do not see how advanced these companies already are, but on the inside, that's sometimes a totally different picture than you would have had from the outside.
SPEAKER_01It's an interesting point because your your career and your experience also touches on kind of venture clienting and corporate venture capital, not necessarily just at Beiersdorf, but also with with places like Oscar and Paul. From your experience with that kind of internal versus external tension, what's your kind of take on the relationships between large established businesses and SMEs or startups? And what have you seen work well and where have you seen it work not so well?
SPEAKER_02It's very difficult and fragile at first. So uh because the larger corporations have a tendency to think everything they do is the right way to do it. And that is sometimes not really suitable for a fast-moving startup. So when we roll out all our processes and uh all the compliance aspects that have to be looked after and so on, then sometimes we are indeed just too slow to really work with a startup. This is especially true if you try to integrate a startup. This is usually not a very good idea. So, because then you will lose all the momentum that the startup had. It becomes just another department, it becomes part of the corporate body with all the positive and negative aspects that come along with them. Nevertheless, I think if you do this uh relationship right, if you set it up right and you do that on an equal basis, we say, okay, we have a level play field here, then it can be fruitful, very fruitful for both sides, because startups uh have a bit more freedom to take risks than large corporates. Look, at Biostoff, we have a global love brand like Nivea. And you can only set such a brand to a certain level of risk. That's really not good if you just put too much risk on. That slows us down indeed in innovation and other management topics. But a startup, of course, they do not have that much to lose, literally. And so this is why it's a common misbelief or wrong belief that just by working with startups, corporates can get so much quicker and faster. No, we're still operating a tanker. Uh, it's not a speedboat, it will not become a speedboat. So that is something that you just have to be really clear about. And also, you need a certain kind of flexibility. Also, for example, in your processes. When I started to build the startup scouting at Biestoff, and we had our very first venture clienting uh pilots, I had to talk to procurement because the standard payment terms that a large corporation has is something that a standard startup will just not survive. It's brutally true that if you say, okay, we're going to pay you in 90 days after the work has been done, the startup is gone. And so this does not really work. Also, expectation management on both sides is really, really crucial. Just because we are talking to the CEO of the startup, um, usually they do not already always talk to our CEO. So this is also something that you just have to level and where you have to build a lot of expectation management.
SPEAKER_00Just to dig into that one really quickly, when you look at collaborations, um, you've either been part of or you've seen, have you seen any patterns of what usually becomes an issue? Is there something that keeps coming up where collaborations potentially break down or communication isn't right? Um, that you've noticed, something people should look out for, red flags, something that you know people should be aware of when they um try to set something up like that.
SPEAKER_02I think the most common thing that gets overlooked quite easily is to really do good expectation management and to not overpromise on both sides. So, because I've seen both things happening, so that corporates, for example, are promising, yeah, we will have a decision in two weeks and it takes three months. Uh so this is a standard issue that we always see because you have to do another alignment round, and then the next colleague or VP is just on vacation or on a business trip or whatever. So um, things have a tendency to not be as fast as we as managers want them to be. So that's one thing. On the other hand, startups have a tendency to overpromise a lot because they are afraid to lose the partnership, to lose that specific client relationship, or simply the revenue. And so they're promising things that they cannot keep because they cannot easily scale or speed up things, and then they have to take a decision. Do we uh lower down the quality, which is absolutely not wanted by the corporate, or do we just have to tell them the truth that we can't deliver on time in full? So I think this is really the most crucial part in the whole process is when you when you get to uh when you learn each other, uh, when you start uh working together, to really be clear and to double-check is that really realistic what we're talking about here? Because the more realistic, even if it's not the best thing you can do, but if it's realistic, then there will be no real disappointments. And that's one of the major issues. Uh and second thing is that startups should keep an eye on their fluctuation. So because that is something that we have seen in the past, where whole teams have been changing on the startup side, and then you literally start again, over and over again to explain everything, your corporate rules, your corporate design, your behavior, your compliance rules, um, the code of conduct, and all these things. And this is just so energy and time draining. Uh, so to have a bit more constant teams on both sides is absolutely helpful. That's also true for the corporate part. There has always to be some sort of translation um office or translator who can both talk startup and talk corporate. Because sometimes we use the same words, but we have different meanings for them. And then, of course, the trouble starts. So, this is always good to have somebody who ideally has been part of the startup ecosystem and now is on the side of the corporate because those are the people who really literally understand both sides and can act as an intermediate between them.
SPEAKER_00Really, really good point. Yeah, absolutely. I I think it also you can notice when it works really well, and we've had this with some of our startups in some of the bigger corporates. We have the corporate champions come back to us and say, we love these guys. They actually make us look good in the meetings because they really understand what we're doing here. And that's the dream, right? From that, you've obviously been tracking emergent technology for a long time. You've mentioned earlier you're ahead of the curve most of the time. You were early on e-commerce, early on digital marketing. And I don't want to miss the opportunity to ask you where are you placing your attention right now? And what do you think is genuinely transformative currently versus maybe overhyped?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So what we build inside of the uh strategic foresight team that I'm currently heading at Biosdorf is a framework that will help us to answer these questions. So none of us can really predict the future. That's not even our job to predict the future. Our job is to minimize surprise. And this is why we established a framework where we have two stable ends. One is really an understanding of our consumers and their jobs to be done. And the other end, some 10, 15, 20 years into the future, is a future scenario. We have built a couple of them and we found one of which we say this is preferable. This is our preferable future, so we can work towards it. And in between there, you have this framework of different developments and trends. So it starts with weak signals. That's something that you spot somewhere around the world, which is not really a pattern yet. It's just new. It turns into a strong signal once others take that up and bring or develop a pattern about it. When that starts to spread regionally or geographically, then you have a trend. And if that is spreading globally, you have a mega trend. And finally, if that is something that is really driving profound change to one or more industries, you have what we call a driving force. For example, artificial intelligence is currently such a driving force. Now it has been around for decades, since the 50s of the last century. But since uh end of 2022, when uh OpenI released ChatGPT, it's really something that has got a lot of traction and momentum, and which is literally changing every single business that we're looking at right now, including things like cosmetics or beauty or skincare, anything like that, because it changes things on the inside and the outside. And we're not only talking about generative AI here, but in general. So that is one thing. What's even more interesting for us is if we look at the convergence of different technologies. Um, because a single trend, a single technology like nanobots or something like that, is interesting, but as such, usually not really applicable to your own business. But then you start to look at convergences, two different technologies. And I have a funny example for that, how that works. So there's one technology I think that we can all agree on will be a standard in the midterm futures, that's autonomous driving. So we have several countries like China where it's already almost a standard. Myself, uh last year in March, for the first time sat in a Waymo, um, so not having a human driver anymore. So this is coming. Another technology that's already there, and which is um yeah, not developing that fast, but still developing, is uh virtual reality. So now you take these two technologies that at first sight do not have really a lot of overlaps. But autonomous driving will lead to a certain amount of unemployment. Sad as it is, but for example, in Germany we do have a bit more than 500,000 professional drivers. So not all of them will be, I don't know, accountants or painters or poets when they lose their job as a driver. So a lot of them will simply have a lot of time at hand. And some of them will escape the harsh reality into a virtual reality because that's nice surrounding there, where you have everything under control, everything is nice and gloomy, and really is a lot of fun. So, but what happens if you wear these uh VR goggles for an extended period of time, let's say eight, twelve hours a day? Then you get really problems with the part around your eyes because there's not enough oxygen on it, there's no sunlight coming into it, there might be high humidity and high temperature, so everything that puts your skin under stress. And this is now where we see a business opportunity, let's call it metacare. So we say it's it's a specific kind of skincare that you need for your eyes under a VR environment. And this is exactly what I'm talking about when it comes to convergence of technology. So you stack or you mix technologies and try then to find out what is the implication for the business that I'm currently operating in? How can we leverage that? Is there an opportunity that we have not seen before? And that's the fun part because by design, I have the luck to play around with every single new technology that comes along, literally play around with it, um, just to uh experiment and find out, okay, will this have an impact or not? If not, okay, we're not dumb by them before. If yes, we have a way to go.
SPEAKER_01In some instances that you've kind of touched on with that external, internal innovation culture and keeping track of trends, whether they're becoming kind of impactful or not, how does that translate into a healthy innovation culture on the inside? And what kind of steer have you kind of seen in your time at companies big and small in terms of the problems that that can cause when things aren't going as well as they could do?
SPEAKER_02As you might know, I'm I'm a bit obsessed with innovation culture because I believe that is what keeps any kind of company alive. So once you stop innovating, you start ending the Corporate life somehow because there's competition there from inside and outside the industry that will try to take your place. So you have to be innovative. If you have to be innovative, then you need an innovation culture. And that culture starts with a single word, and that is trust. I trust that you have good ideas. I trust that you pursue the most important of these ideas and not just the fun side projects, but the ones that will really drive the business forwards. And you trust that I will provide you with the decisions and resources that you need to turn ideas into profitable realities. So that's one thing. And the other thing is really that this trust is earned by an environment or a culture of experimentation. Deliberately not saying a failure culture, because nobody likes failures. And also, you do not necessarily learn from failures. You can repeat the same mistake 99 times and still haven't learned a thing. So the one time you make it right, that is when you really actually have learned something. This is why we try to avoid that something has failed. We simply said, okay, we did an experiment and it didn't turn out as expected. But we learned how it worked or did not work. Like Thomas Addison once said, I never failed, I just found a thousand ways that don't work. This is the kind of mindset that you need for experimentation and therefore for innovation culture. Also, to never be ashamed, embarrass yourself daily. That's one of the mottos that I live by. Um, because whenever you try to get better at anything that you do, you can by definition not look good. It's not possible. While you're training, you always look like a total idiot. I'm sorry to say. Not want to talk about it.
SPEAKER_00That makes a lot of sense. And I think it's so, so crucial, but a lot of the times in corporate settings, it doesn't come easy, right? That trust and that willingness for failure. You've also been running the Biastoff Entrepreneurship Program, Upstarter. I guess that's a big part of that, right? Um, to help um the team internally get comfortable with that more entrepreneurial mindset. From your perspective, what does it actually take to make real entrepreneurship work? And, you know, not just a program that looks good on paper and kind of fancy in LinkedIn posts, but something that genuinely changes how people think and build.
SPEAKER_02I believe that the secret source of Upstarter is engagement. What do I mean by that? So a lot of um entrepreneurship programs that we analyze before we set up Upstarter, they work with certain kinds of incentives. So they promise you some reward that you get after running through the program. We don't do that uh at Upstarter. Also, we do not promise certain resources during the what we promise is that we we guide you along and try to help you turn your idea into a profitable reality by coaching, by giving advice, by mentoring, by hiring external experts on presentation and things like that, and a lot of tools. But the major part really is engagement because Upstarter is run by volunteers for volunteers. And that, of course, has a different level than if it's just another corporate program. Another corporate program is that you shrug off and say, okay, let's do this. But if you know everybody here is spending their own time, sometimes additional time, and all of their engagement and experiences to help others, then you establish a culture of growth. And it's growth on both sides. So we running the whole program, we learn as much as our entrepreneurs. Of course, they develop certain skills that they did not have before, but we learn about all the great ideas that are around the globe that we can simply collect and try to make the best out of them, which is really a wonderful thing to do because that is um, whenever we experience after a batch, um, how example uh our board members react to the different ideas, that is a source of immense pride. So where we say, okay, yeah, this is this is really cool. We built this from an idea that was just in somebody's head or on somebody's laptop, and now turned it into something that can actually hit the shelf in, I don't know, two or three years. So that is what I mean by engagement. That is the most important part.
SPEAKER_00That makes a lot of sense. And just one follow-up question on that. Obviously, throughout the best experience for someone who has an idea that actually makes it to being greenlit and makes it to reality. What happens to those that don't? Is there some strategy or thinking you have behind that? Because I guess it's really important for continuous engagement and to handle that, right?
SPEAKER_02Of course, we can't promise that anything will be successful or even be turned into a um a product afterwards. That's also not part of the program. So the program ends the day we have the final pitch before a grand jury. The grand jury consists of people who actually have the resources and the power to decide will this be a proper project or not, with a proper funding or without. So this is the only promise that we give. We bring you to the to that pitch and we make you pitch ready. That's the whole promise. And that, at least, speaking from the the uh first batches that we had, is something that is very, very highly valued by our entrepreneurs who say we learned so much, we got so much better at business model thinking, in our entrepreneurial skills, in presentation techniques. And now for this year, because of course exactly what you just mentioned happens a lot, things will not be successful, they will not be turned into a product that will hit the shelves in three years. This is why we added for this year for the first time to our batch a resilience training. So we hired an external coach who guides along the entrepreneurial teams and says, okay, we will build your resilience because there will be setbacks, there will be questions, there will be doubt um along the way, and there is a higher probability that at the end of the day you build a great idea, but it will never never see the light of any retail shelf. And so building this resilience is also something where we say this is really valuable for our entrepreneurs. At least that's what we hope.
SPEAKER_01Getting used to the risk, I think, is always an interesting output from a program in terms of how people are climatized or not. I mean, kind of building on that, coming back to you personally, as we've discussed over the last kind of half hour or so, you've worn many hats in your career. So founder, CMO, consultant, VC, entrepreneurship program lead. You touched on creativity being a thread that connects all of these things that you do. But it would there be a different thread or another way that you'd describe what you've actually done or what you're actually doing across these roles today?
SPEAKER_02I wish it was so easy to answer that.
SPEAKER_01So we like the hard questions.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, I see. So maybe it's it's it's my disability to see or accept the world just as it is. I'm always interested in looking for what's coming next, and how can I shape that that this is going to be good. This is really what drives me, and this is what keeps me up at night. So this, of course, leads to that permanently I see things with, okay, we can change that, or we can use that in a different way. So the the old um hacker ethics um come a lot into play here. Which also means on the bright side of everything, I'm really good at seeing the big picture and starting things. The downside is I'm not so good in building things or even running these things. So, of the three roles that you need for innovation, you have the starter, the builder, and the runner. The starter is the one who has the bright idea and who sees the future and really is visionary and enthusiastic and can paint a picture in bright colors that everybody likes likes to make true. But then you need these uh builders who can really take that idea and make them a reality. So, this is also true for an upstart of the entrepreneurship program. I'm not good at running at this, but I do have a great project management team who is building that and who is even running that because that is the third rule, and this is really where I'm really, really bad at is running things. So keeping them smoothly, repeating them or optimizing them or anything like that. I don't have the right thinking and the right skills for that. Um, so this is why I always need people along with me that will A turn my ideas into reality, and B, when these are already a reality, who run these things. This is why I'm not no longer part of our corporate venture capital team, for example, because I had my time when we built that whole thing. Now that it's running smoothly and they just set up the second fund of 100 million, there's no need for me anymore. So I think that maybe answers that question a bit.
SPEAKER_00I think it does, but also what it shows me is I think your team is very lucky in the entrepreneurial entrepreneurship sense and beyond to learn from you because I bet you were a really good founder because you're a lot more reflected than a lot of the other founders than you come across about you know what your strengths are and what maybe um you know areas are where you need help and you need support. And that's a really, really good quality to have.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, it was not always the case, yeah. So I think for especially for the first startup, I try to be the jack of all trades myself. But I said, yeah, I do not have the money or the resources to get a professional team, so I have to do everything by myself. Or I wanted to keep things under control, so I had to do everything by myself, which ended up me being totally overworked and not delivering what was necessary. Uh so that was one of the very first very harsh learnings that I had to take from being an entrepreneur is there are people that you better don't touch. Uh so very you will need help, and it's okay to ask for help, even though sometimes these questions might seem stupid. Uh so but instead of finding out the hard way and making a costly mistake or ruining the company, embarrass yourself. Ask the stupid questions and hope to get that help that you need.
SPEAKER_00100% agreed. And I I think, and we probably won't want to wear into that topic too much. We don't have days and months, but I think that skill of not being scared to ask questions in a setting like you know, a meeting or in person are gonna become more and more rare as people get used to just asking all their questions to AI. You don't practice that muscle of, oh, this is uncomfortable. And I think I think that's gonna create issues in the future, but that's maybe a bigger, bigger topic.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely, especially if people take everything for the truth, what the computer says. So I think the one skill that I, even in the near future, do not see that can be taken over easily by an AI is critical thinking. Because there's always something that all of our life experience, what we like to call intuition or experience, is something that's so hard to train and to a large language model. Uh, so it really makes us unique. And I think that is also a skill or a muscle that we should not stop training.
SPEAKER_00We'll try. We'll try our best not to stop everyone listening. But let's shift gears maybe slightly. I recently came across a post of yours where you were reaching out to people in innovation and product development and areas like that, um, talking about the value of bad ideas. You know, the ones that get dismissed or forgotten, or they just never actually leave the room because you know, people didn't ask the right or difficult questions. What's behind that thinking and what have you been discovering in your discussions?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's um that's my current pet project. And um it's based on a realization that I had a couple of years ago when I was sitting in a meeting and um it was brainstorming, and people came up with ideas, and somebody else who has been way too long with the company always said, yeah, we had that 10 years ago. No, this didn't work. We tried that five years ago. And I said, does that make the idea really bad? And if we tried that 10 years ago, maybe times have changed. And so I came to a realization or conclusion rather, that ideas per se are never bad. It's just the context that lets them look bad. Give you an example. If I tell you I'm going to jump off a balcony in the fifth floor, sounds like a totally stupid idea, right? But if I then tell you that the building that I'm in is on fire, and downstairs, uh outside on the street, there are the firefighters with a jumping net to catch me. The idea has not changed a bit. Only the context that I provided. And so this is when I said, okay, sometimes ideas have to be bad or stupid at first because those are the ones that really have impact. There's this guy called, his his name was Thunder Levin. And I think, I don't know, 12 or 13 years ago, he sat in an office in a meeting and said, hey, let's do a movie about a tornado full of sharks. I mean, that that is uh objectively a super stupid idea. Fast forward to today, we're now uh looking forward to Sharknado number six, so five sequels, with a total revenue of $2.5 billion. And that's really a stupid idea. So the catch here is ideas are always a product. So in everything apart of that multiplication has to be higher than zero. It's one zero inside the whole equation, and then the result is zero. So, and this is exactly where I try, okay, in the context might change. Ideas do not really die. They never do. They go into hibernation. Sometimes they go into cold rigidity. Hibernation, they wake up once per year, cold rigidity. They wake up when there's definite climate change, like in artificial intelligence. Uh, artificial intelligence had that long so-called AI winter. That was cold rigidity. But then the climate changed because suddenly the computing power was there to uh make some deliberate progress in that field, and suddenly everything had momentum again. So this is now, of course, um something where say, okay, there are a gazillion of ideas that have been dismissed in the past in any corporate environment, be it small company, large company, whatever. Because everybody of us has ideas that we're not going to see the light of the day in the next years, very often alone due to a lack of resources, because we have to prioritize things. What happens to those ideas if they go into hibernation? Well, usually not. Nothing. Yeah, they get forgotten over time, especially when the employee, the colleague, leaves the company because uh retires or changes the employer, um, the ideas are finally gone. And with that, all the value that they might have had if we just looked at them with a new context. And so I came up with this idea. Why not have sort of a day of dead ideas, you know, like the day of the dead in Mexico, and just celebrate all the dead ideas that we had. Look at them in a fresh context, because I promise you, there will be several occasions where somebody says, hmm, that idea doesn't look too bad. Uh, or how could we forget that we have this great idea? Now it totally makes sense because now there is the feasibility that was not given 10 years ago. And so this is um kind of my my pet project. Uh, how to dig up all these dead ideas and re-evaluate them?
SPEAKER_00That's amazing. I love it. Can't wait to see what you discover. And I love the idea for the Day of the Dead ideas. It's a really, really fun approach.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, a bit like the startup funeral concept. But aside from the Sharknado team, because it's one of my favorite film series, when you kind of take a step back and think of someone driving innovation in any sector or or in any way, do you have any any kind of specific people that come to mind that either kind of generally or genuinely rather impress and inspire you? And if so, what about their approach or or how they do things stands out?
SPEAKER_02I think there's there's one uh innovator and entrepreneur that I to this day found utterly impressive. That's James Dyson. If you look how long it took him to get that first product right, um, the vacuum, I I don't know the exact number, but it was a really, really long time span until he finally got it. And now look what came afterwards. Uh so he really is turning air into gold, literally. Yeah, because all the products that he built have to do something with moving air. And I found it so impressive uh how he came up with a hairdryer and um, I don't know, the the cooling uh machines without any fan or movable objects, anything like that. So he's really one who has super uh freaking ideas to a fan without any rotating parts. Yeah, sounds like a stupid idea again, but he did it. So, and he then even turns it into a really nicely designed object that you want to have just for the aesthetics of it, which is also super impressive. He hired the right designers, obviously, and then he brings it to a market to such a high price premium that I'm already impressed. How expensive can a higher hairdryer be? But making that successful is something where I have deepest respect for it. Great idea, turn it into great products and sell them at the great price. That is really something that I found adorable or admirable.
SPEAKER_00Lovely. We've come to the end. Diek, thank you so much for joining us. I'd like to ask one last question, which is what is next for you and your team? And how can listeners follow you, follow your work or connect with you?
SPEAKER_02So let's start with the last question because that's pretty easy. I'm pretty easy to find on the internet, aka just follow me on LinkedIn. And um, sometimes, sometimes with a higher frequencies, sometimes for months you won't hear anything from me. I try to share my thoughts on LinkedIn in posts because I always learn from the reactions that I get. Yeah, because it always sparks a discussion, and that's very fruitful for me. So that's the easiest part. What's next for me? Let's put the team first. So we're currently trying to turn strategic foresight into innovation intelligence. Intelligence not as human intelligence, but like, I don't know, an intelligence service, uh like the CIA or anything like that. So really turning all the signals that we see into something that is ready to decide and to create such a high confidence level that upper management gets an update from us, I don't know, once per quarter, and then really has some profound data to decide upon. Uh so minimizing surprise. That's next for the team. And privately, I'm currently um writing another book. So um how exciting.
SPEAKER_00What's it about?
SPEAKER_02Um so uh unfortunately this works only in German, um, but I will try to translate it a bit.
SPEAKER_00Sounds like then whoever whoever understands can can understand.
SPEAKER_02It's it's going to be called die Dirk Strategie, the Dirk Strategy, uh, because I found out that my my my first name is actually an acronym. It's uh delegate, ignore, reeduce, or correct. So in German, correct is uh with a K, not a C, like in English. And the the the subtitle is Wie du deine Aufgaben erledigst before sie dich erledigen? So how to get things done before you are done by them. Yeah, because uh I played around with so many um, I don't know, uh time management tools, uh, to-do lists, uh, Eisenhower matrix, and all these things, and none of them work. None of them. So, and this is why we usually do not take the time to really look at any given task that we have been uh given. Um to really say, okay, am I the best one to do that, or should I delegate that to not only downwards to my team, but it can also be sidewards. It can be upwards. Delegating upwards is uh an underdeveloped skill in most companies, or outwards, uh, or back to sender. So that's delegating. Then I ignoring uh ignoring an idea. So many ideas have the tendency to look very urgent, but they aren't. They look very important, but they aren't. So just letting them cook a bit or stay in the inbox for a while and see, okay, is there any follow-up? Is anybody asking if this actually gets done? That is ignoring that. So which then decides, is it really important or not? Um, reducing, I mean, uh, that's pretty self-explanatory. It's really just um saying, okay, uh, not do always the 100%, but try to get along with 20%, because if you really boil an idea or a task down to the job to be done, then usually a lot of the solution that you had in mind or that the issuer had in mind is not really necessary. So effort minimizing. And finally, correcting is really again looking at the job to be done and doing just that, even if it does not exactly fit the original task. Because many people also again like working with startups, yeah, we do not talk about our problems, our challenges, but we ask them and already have a solution in mind. And that's not always the best solution. So this is the K then in the Dirk strategy. Uh, just finished um the first chapters, so 60 pages are written. Uh, another 180 are still to come until the end of the year.
SPEAKER_00Wow, that's so cool. Well, you have one reader here, so um, let me know once it's done. I'm excited. But either way, we know you're super busy, not just with work. Now we know you're also an author. So thank you for taking the time to join us um for the podcast.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me. It was really a pleasure.
SPEAKER_00That's a wrap on this episode of The Innovation Brief. A huge thank you to DIEC PLOS for reminding us that real innovation isn't about just chasing trends, it's about curiosity, courage, and a willingness to build before anyone else sees what's possible.
SPEAKER_01So if you've enjoyed the conversation, subscribe to the Innovation Brief and leave us a review. It'll help other listeners find the podcast. We'll be back soon with another conversation from the frontier of innovation. This has been the Innovation Brief, and I've been Will Benton.
SPEAKER_00And I'm Gabby Matic. Thanks for listening.