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Inside Innovation & Focused Execution: Replay with Voltage Control's Douglas Ferguson
Inside Innovation & Focused Execution: Replay with Voltage Control's Douglas Ferguson
ratings:
Length:
14 minutes
Released:
Aug 16, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
In this episode, Brian Ardinger talks with Douglas Ferguson, founder of Voltage Control, a company focused on design sprints and getting new products to market. Douglas tries to look at the product as a whole unit and is convinced that ideas are worthless. It’s more about focused execution. Douglas brings an operators viewpoint, as he moves into consulting and thinking about Innovation from a broader perspective. Brian and Douglas discuss some of the problems companies face, when building from within, including the desire to standardize. Companies try to jam everything together and avoid focusing on customers’ needs. For example, AT&T buys other company's services and then takes them to market. With this strategy, AT&T will never be able to provide a superb service, because they are so far from the consumer. When companies try to innovate, often the problem is putting a lot of resource constraints on projects. Douglas uses a framework called Eco Cycles to view the innovation processes. Projects move from birth to maturity to creative destruction to rebirth. In between, there is a rigidity trap and poverty trap. Many big company projects get stuck in that poverty trap. Douglas also highlights an interesting article from Josh Baer @CapitalFactory called the Texas manifesto. In the article, it explains that Austin will never be a Silicon Valley, but that to succeed Texas needs to connect their four major cities. With that aim, Josh and others load up a bus with VCs, startups, and mentors and travel to a Texas city each month. Check it out.Austin is starting to see organizations mature and more second and third-time entrepreneurs taking more swings at bat. However, startups doing big bold things and raising large amounts of capital are still getting sucked out to Silicon Valley. To contact Douglas and read about Voltage Control check out Voltagecontrol.com For more content like this, check out Brian's interview with Teresa Torres at Product Talk (REPLAY OF INTERVIEW - Oct, 2018)FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company. For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database. Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.
Released:
Aug 16, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Ep. 4 - Scott Childs from Capital One: Today, we got a chance to talk to Scott Childs, Senior Experience Design Lead at Capital One, about the Five-day Sprint Design Process. From problem to prototype, we explored how this simple and sleek lean start-up tool can be an excellent tool to develop by Inside Outside Innovation