In many ways, the most important step in the Get to Next 5-step process Envision, Expand, Build, Engage is step five: ACTIVATE. We asked ANDREA KATES, instructor in the Masterclass series, about her WHY.
What is it that inspired her to conceptualize Get To Next? What was the big missing element she saw in corporate innovation and strategy that led her to the original thinking behind “futureproofing”? Why does she believe everyone needs to be retooled from mindsets like Six Sigma, Open Innovation, Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Agile/Kaizen, Blitzscaling to embrace Get To Next?
Andrea Kates DNA: Andrea Kates has a deep commitment to unlocking the power of technology and innovation and a deep understanding of “unmet customer needs.” She has led corporate initiatives that were pivotal in moving teams, executives, and even companies toward a braver and bolder direction.
WHAT IS YOUR PERSONAL “WHY” BEHIND GET TO NEXT? WHAT’S YOUR PERSONAL COMMITMENT TO THIS APPROACH?
There was a statistic that kept me up at night for months — the percentage of corporate leaders who KNEW that innovation was the key to survival was 89%+ and growing at breakneck speed. But the ABILITY to keep up was abysmal. The statistics on how many leaders felt EQUIPPED to deal with the sudden speed and uncertainty of today’s market was at 11% . I set out to fix that.
WHAT’S THE DESIGN OF GET TO NEXT? HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE FORMAT?
Everyone has just experienced the power (and pitfalls) of online learning. I was lucky because I was involved as an early pioneer in distance learning, educational design (when I worked in educational media with PBS and at the Texas Medical Center) and in “flipped classrooms” at Princeton and Berkeley.
Lots needed to be rethought for executives and corporate teams.
What they told us was that they wanted a concentrated experience, without a lot of homework. They wanted coaching, immediate relevance, learning by doing, lots of sparring with peers and tremendous proof of concept with practical case studies.
We followed those principles with an emphasis on a high degree of relevance and practical application.
HOW DO YOU TEACH VIRTUALLY? IS IT PRERECORDED OR LIVE? HOW DOES THE COACHING WORK?
We do the instruction. We do coaching in small groups in between sessions. We spread it over five modules so you get to apply the ideas in the wild. And we designed a series of tools that have been field tested with 200+ teams over the last 5 years that pinpoint the most important steps in the Envision, Expand, Build, Engage, Activate framework.
WHAT’S YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION IN A NUTSHELL?
We take the guesswork out of innovation. We bring “rational optimism” to leaders. Everyone gets rapid immersion in the latest tech without any buzzwords. And we teach everyone how to get their teams and their customers and their partners and their other leaders on the same page with full commitment.
We break it down so it’s remarkably simple and painless.
Over the course of 5 modules, you basically master everything you need.
Add water, and stir…
HOW DID YOU GET STARTED CONCEPTUALIZING GET TO NEXT?
After working in the field of corporate growth for 2+ decades, I suddenly realized that all of the companies and teams and initiatives I worked with had “strategic debt.” There’s “technical debt” where you keep fixing a legacy system with patch after patch until you realize you have to retool.
I coined the term “strategic debt” because when we tried to address innovation + strategy, we were working with an incomplete and mismatched set of tools. We had pieced together lots of bits and tools with duct tape, but those tools couldn’t pass the stress test of the 2020s.
CAN YOU GIVE EXAMPLES OF TOOLS THAT NEEDED TO BE RETHOUGHT TO ADDRESS “STRATEGIC DEBT”?
I know teams still rely on classic frameworks like SWOT and Five Forces to start their strategy. Teams have made fantastic progress with fields like Design Thinking and Open Innovation in the innovation realm. We had brilliant processes like Agile, Kaizen in operations. Lean Startup and Blitzscaling from the startup/scaleup realm. And inspiration from Exponential thinkers and Futurists inspiring us with another view of what could come. Of course, I’ll also add my book Find Your Next which introduced core innovation principles for Business Model Innovation and Cross-Industry Insights.
But, it was time to weave all of the best elements of those schools into one end-to-end approach. No more duct tape. Designed for 2021+. Inspired by the speed of post-Covid transformation. Focused on Speed, Cross-Industry Inspiration, Technology Mastery and probably the most important element of all: Building a Culture of Corporate Activation.
Enough models and frameworks and canvases and sprints. It was time to tackle activation…moving early stage ideas across the finish line.
WHERE ALONG THE JOURNEY HAVE YOU HAD TO DRUM UP MOMENTS OF COURAGE?
There’s an expression that most big ideas require “20 seconds of insane courage”. That’s the story of how I became the CEO of a Silicon Valley SaaS company, which I led for 4 years starting in 2013.
I had been working on corporate innovation and realized there was something missing. A friend I’d met through the TED organization heard me talking about “Find Your Next” (my first book) and said he was working on something called “lean startup” with the founder of that movement and the leaders of the I-Corps program, which was the US government program for commercializing research. I said, “well, I think CORPORATIONS could benefit from that lean startup thinking.” So I flew to Silicon Valley to suggest that. The 20 seconds of insane courage came after my idea was NOT initially seen as a great idea. But I persisted…
The result of that 20 seconds of courage? We ended up collaborating with Emily Watkins from Jones Lang LaSalle to field test it and I became CEO of the software company, giving me visibility into 13,000 teams trying to commercialize research and bring innovation to corporate scale. As CEO I led a wide series of corporate immersions with companies like Intel, Nasdaq, WL Gore, Mayo Clinic, KK Wind, Atrium Healthcare and 3M and worked closely with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to refine the process of bringing lean startup to corporate leaders. Worth it.
PROFILES IN INSPIRATION
Finally, we’re interested in how you came to the original thinking behind Get To Next. Can you give us a sense of who has influenced your strategic insights about corporate innovation at scale?
I’ve been lucky to work with clients who became role models in leadership, vision, execution, technology commercialization and scale. This year, as we unveil Futureproofing U, I wanted to thank some of them.
Bob Walton (HP) taught me how logistics and operational innovation could drive tremendous innovation and product insight
Matt Winter, former CEO of Allstate. The initiative we worked on laid the foundation for early digitalization of insurance
Joe Pinto, when he led a billion dollar plus line of business at Cisco and I was Innovator in Residence. Joe taught me the importance of going beyond “hackathons” and “beauty pageants” when evaluating early-stage corporate initiatives. He asked two questions that have stuck with me since: How do you get corporate teams to kill their darlings? How do you avoid bright, shiny objects?
Jaime Foucher at Ford. We collaborated for years to integrate design thinking, lean startup, agile, and portfolio management both in the US and China. Jaime taught me the importance of what we now call “innovation triage” — getting everyone on the same page about which factors matter most when it comes to innovation
James Rogers (Mayo Clinic Ventures) who brought multiple cohorts of early-stage ventures to the lean startup tech SaaS company where I was CEO. We refined our methodology for moving through Business Model Canvases, Customer Discovery, Experimentation, Validation all the way through to commercialization. [Years later, there are many IPOs and exits that resulted.]
Jessica Ross. Currently SVP Finance, Office of Transformation at Salesforce. Collaborated on a Future of Finance project for the women’s finance community in San Francisco that radically reimagined finance’s seat at a new table and worked on the Future of Finance project with Stitch Fix (the company had its IPO during the project).
Darryl Drenon. We worked together to drive double digit growth in telecom by tapping into what customers WEREN’T saying. We were thinking “voice”. They were needing “data storage.”
Diana Gaviria and Marcela Rueda at Connect, Bogota. Multi-year initiatives field testing the elements of Futureproofing : Next with teams at Davivienda, Seguros Bolivar, Ecopetrol, Team and other Colombian companies.
Thomas Krogh Jensen (Copenhagen Fintech) and Mario Hernandez (OpenFinance Mexico). Leading global advisory groups to shift the dynamics of fintech on a global scale. Also fellow global advisory board members like Ashok Kalyanswamy (Saxo Bank), Tendayi Viki (Pirates in the Navy + Strategyzer), Caroline Hart Sehested, Stine Kalmer Jørgensen.
Mohi Ahmed, currently heading Open Innovation at Shimizu Corporation. Had brought the Dream Team of collaborators together through Fujitsu’s Open Innovation Gateway to reimagine large-scale corporate impact. The “band” did field work on Ikigai in Ogami Village, worked with Eneos, SuMi Trust, and dozens of other companies to think cross-industry and advance large-scale initiatives in AI, blockchain, and advanced technologies.
Jane Chen, CEO and co-founder of Embrace. I was a board member for Embrace Innovations, one of the first “frugal innovations” coming out of Stanford’s MBA/D-School, I learned the journey of the entrepreneur, did field work in India on low birthweight infants and the importance of surrounding a CEO with investors like Marc Benioff and Tony Robbins.
Lars Ib heads Business Institute Denmark where I have taught for a decade. The students are all experienced business leaders, working to refine their game. I started teaching Find Your Next when my book came out, and have been field testing “rapid immersion exec training” with every team. The biggest enemies are time pressure and homework, so I created active learning modules, flipped teaching experiences, and real-world bursts of learning with experts from Lego, Vestas, Grundfos, Danske Bank, Maersk to make it real.
Moises Noreña and Nancy Tennant who sponsored me as an Innovation Luminary with Notre Dame’s executive innovation program. They’re pioneers in the field of applied innovation with brilliant track records at Whirlpool in establishing a new wave of applied innovation. Moises continues to revolutionize and inspire through his work at Moen, where he’s taken a consumer brand from the shower head into a mass movement based on rethinking water use.
Seth Godin for blurbing my first book and for leading an incredible Marketing Seminar where I met a Mastermind group I’ve stuck with ever since. For people who don’t know Seth “off stage”, I remember being his warmup act in LA 8 years ago and wondering why he was the keynoter and I was the warmup. Then, I watched his professionalism, generosity of spirit, attention to every single detail and his brilliant onstage capacity and it inspired me to raise my game. Thank you, Seth.
Deborah Chase Hopkins sponsored my original Find Your Next book tour through her leadership of innovation at Citi. She has since served as a valuable sounding board as the Futureproofing concepts emerged and has been a role model for Board of Directors positions.
Kent Lawson who was at IDEO at the time we met. We worked on The Future of Healthcare together and he introduced me to Design Thinking and Rapid Prototyping. I’ll never forget the 3-D model I made out of Styrofoam and corrugated cardboard that represented Digital Healthcare.
Zeev Neuwirth who was an early collaborator in applying Silicon Valley thinking to his healthcare initiatives at Atrium Health. He introduced me to the neuroscience of habits which led the way for an Impactathon at Stanford a few years later with Nir Iyal, Kyra Bobinet and Tristan Harris.
Alex Tsado, Alliance4AI reminded me how important it is to look toward geographies like Africa to engage talent in AI and other critical tech fields.
Daniel Kraft, Exponential Medicine/Singularity University who always taught me that raising my ambition to a level of greater impact is important. Starting in the early days of TED, we got together with a group that included Will Weisman (Kittyhawk Ventures/Singularity), Bill Villarreal (Dolby) and others to envision the impact we’d like our work to have.
Lou Pugliese. One of my colleagues from the early days of educational media with PBS. He went on to work with Ted Turner and Blackboard, and always keeps me on the path to lead virtual education to the next level. The technologies have come of age to create something remarkable.
David Pilson. Worked with me in the early days leading projects in telecom, medicine, and energy. In the years in-between, David has risen to inspiring roles with eBay and now with Upwork in driving new perspectives on talent in the workplace and brilliant insights in legal policy.
Nicolas Cortazar for experimenting together to pivot a Bogota-based company from a struggling model toward a thriving path.
UC Berkeley, Princeton University’s eLab, Stanford University’s Knight-Hennessey Fellows program, Copenhagen Business School, Business Institute Denmark, Notre Dame University: all programs where I’ve been in residence, led courses, and all of the participants in field work
Colleagues and collaborators: Greg Satell, Chrestina Monkholm, Chris Colbert, Maggie Riad, Jorge Arango, Jonathan Hoffberg, Mark Zawacki, Jim Euchner, Dave Marvit, Ryoma Ohashi, Henry Chesbrough, Jean-François Harvey, Jean-Marc Frangos, Barry Katz, Tim Leberecht, Cindy White, Emily Watkins, David Rasson, Bianca Lopes, Ennis Olson, Navi Radjou, Moises
Noreña, Jim Chappell, Neil Cohen, Neil Cohen, David Rasson, Thierry Geerts, Bianca Lopes, Nicole Yershon, John Monks, Pascal Coppens, Sam McAfee, Martin Hopp, Alex Popov, Amy Edmondson, Kathleen Nielson, Michelle DeAngelis.
Hello, my name is Andrea Kates, I developed an original system to Activate Innovation called Get To Next, where we work with corporate teams to drive bigger, bolder, simpler futures. It’s a research-based approach I developed with based on insights from 30,000 teams and 200 corporate + scaleup client projects.
I started to gather these insights when I was CEO of a San Francisco-based SaaS software company co-founded by the originator of lean startup. Some of the companies I’ve worked with on an ongoing basis: Fujitsu, Ford (China and US), SuMi Trust, Hyatt, Audi, Intel, HP, KK Wind (Denmark), Intergráficas (Colombia), and Stitch Fix.
I’m also a keynote speaker on the Future Of…and I marry emerging research with practical insight into 99 issues that keep innovation from moving across the finish line.
I live in San Francisco and I am a global project lead and advisor to corporate transformation leaders. I also sit on the advisory board of Copenhagen Fintech, OpenFinance (Mexico), and Business Institute (Denmark) and have been thought leader in residence at Cisco, and Open Innovation Gateway powered by FUJITSU.
Envision. Expand. Build. Engage. And most of all…Activate. A new point of departure to deliver on innovation.
