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Inside Outside Innovation

Inside Outside Innovation

Written by: Brian Ardinger Founder of Inside Outside Innovation podcast InsideOutside.io and the Inside Outside Innovation Summit
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 Inside Outside Innovation explores the ins and outs of innovation with raw stories, real insights, and tactical advice from the best and brightest in startups & corporate innovation. Each week we bring you the latest thinking on talent, technology, and the future of innovation. Join our community of movers, shakers, makers, founders, builders, and creators to help speed up your knowledge, skills, and network. Previous guests include thought leaders such as Brad Feld, Arlan Hamilton, Jason Calacanis, David Bland, Janice Fraser, and Diana Kander, plus insights from amazing companies including Nike, Cisco, ExxonMobil, Gatorade, Orlando Magic, GE, Samsung, and others. This podcast is available on all podcast platforms and InsideOutside.io. Sign up for the weekly innovation newsletter at http://bit.ly/ionewsletter. Follow Brian on Twitter at @ardinger or @theiopodcast or Email brian@insideoutside.io2022 Economics Leadership Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • Mental Models for AI, Middle School Dating, and Robot Olympics with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

    Mental Models for AI, Middle School Dating, and Robot Olympics with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton
    Jan 13 2026
    On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down to talk about new mental models for working with AI, the similarities between startups and middle school dating, and lessons learned from the robot Olympics. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger and Miles Zero’s Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.Interview Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton[00:00:40] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and I have my co-host, Robyn Bolton. Welcome, Robyn.[00:00:50] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here as always. [00:00:52] Brian Ardinger: We are in a brand-new year 2026. Who would've thought? Exciting to start the year with you. Appreciate you coming on board. [00:00:58] Robyn Bolton: Yep. High point of the year so far. [00:01:00] Brian Ardinger: We've got a lot of things going on on the plate. Anything you want to talk about? [00:01:04] Robyn Bolton: Couple of new things I mentioned earlier, one of our stories from last year is back in the news, the Samsung AI fridge just voted worst in show at CES this year. People finally caught on to the fact that we may be overcomplicating the refrigerator.Thought that was a funny callback, and I got to admit, I feel like you called it Brian and I echoed it of like we've gone too far. So, personally, professionally in my space, starting to do a lot more work in uncertainty and helping people figure out how to make decisions without the data they want or need, and how to help teams move through a world that is getting only more and more uncertain every day. So, it's exciting. [00:01:51] Brian Ardinger: Saw your newsletter this last week, and yeah, the new positioning, or you're talking about how it's not just about innovation, it's more about how do you deal with the fact that nothing that you expected to happen is going to happen, and how do you deal in probability and uncertainty. [00:02:06] Robyn Bolton: Great for innovators, because that's one thing that as the innovators, whether you're a startup founder, a consultant, a corporate innovator, every day you're dealing with uncertainty and trying to figure out how to move forward. Even though we've always called this innovation, it has much broader application these days. [00:02:23] Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Let's get right into it.We've got a couple of different articles we've been reading over the holiday season. The first article we want to talk about is called Six Mental Models for Working With AI. It's from Azeem Azhar. He's got a great Substack newsletter out there that publishes pretty much almost daily, I think it comes out. But he was talking about the way he's been looking at AI over the past year and trying to come up with different models that are making it more effective. All these AI tools are brand new and that, and people are trying to figure out what works, what doesn't work, how to use them better, and I think it's sometimes interesting to take other people's perspectives and what has worked for them and discuss that.So, in his article, he goes over a couple of different frameworks that he uses when he is either trying to understand better how to use a tool. One of the ones I was going to talk about is, he calls it the 50 x reframe, and he says, when he is dealing with a particular problem and trying to understand like, how can I automate it, how can I make it better, how can I make it faster and that he asked the question, what would I do if I had 50 people working on this problem. And asked the AI basically to help him think through the framework. Or if you know 50 people were working on this particular project, how could you automate it or what would change if you had 50 people to be able to dig into a particular area.So, I thought that was a very interesting framework to think about it. And we oftentimes get constrained in like it's just me or just my team. But what if you just flipped the framework and said, what if I had 50 people on my team to work on it? How would that change what I'm doing? [00:03:46] Robyn Bolton: I loved that one. I mean that one, it's the first one listed in the article. And I'll admit, I started reading the article. It's a big skeptical when I started reading it because you know, his first sentence is the question of whether AI is good enough for serious knowledge work has been answered. And I was like. Yes, it's been answered. It's not. And then I kept reading. I'm like, oh, he has a different answer.The 50 x reframe just stopped me in my tracks, was like, that's genius of shifting from how do I as one person do this better with AI's help to completely ...
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    15 mins
  • Radical Reinvention, IKEA effect, and AI Innovation with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

    Radical Reinvention, IKEA effect, and AI Innovation with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton
    Dec 30 2025
    On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about how change is changing, the IKEA effect on MVPs, and how AI is making companies more ambidextrous. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Miles Zero’s, Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact.Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and my co-host Robyn Bolton is with me. Hello Robin. How are you?[00:00:45] Robyn Bolton: Hello, Brian. I'm great. How are you?[00:00:50] Brian Ardinger: I am doing well. We are in the middle of December.[00:00:54] Robyn Bolton: And hard to believe that the year is, it's almost over.[00:00:58] Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm ramping up for 2026. We've got a lot of stuff to talk about for the conference that we're going to be planning. Yes. We'll talk to you a little bit more about that, but let's just jump in. We've got some articles to discuss, some things that we've been seeing out there in the ether when it comes to innovation.Innovation and AI in 2026. Setting the Stage for ChangeThe first article is Change is Changing How to Meet the Challenge of Radical Reinvention, published by McKinsey. There's a lot of things I want to dive into this. Obviously, McKinsey's probably in the wheelhouse of disruption, as their game is going to be changed. So, I read this article with two lenses.One, the lens of what they are telling their clients, and then two, are they eating their own dog food when it comes to this? So, for reference, the McKinsey article talks about, you know, when change becomes everywhere, every, everything everywhere, all at once. How are companies dealing with this? And it's no wonder that the average employee experiences all these particular changes and is worn out.And I think one of the things they quoted was the number of new experiences that the average employee faces is fivefold increase than a decade ago. The fact that organizations and leaders have all new types of tools and skills and methods to navigate this changing, complex state, and those old tools don't necessarily apply today. So I love your first insight, and we'll go from there. Radical Reinvention and Innovation Strategy. Rethinking Change at Scale[00:02:13] Robyn Bolton: McKinsey turns out great stuff and great frameworks and all that stuff. And also, as someone who's been a consultant for entirely too long, they also make me laugh. Like in a super nerdy consultant way. Because one of the things that's laid out this article is the four Cs of change.You know, it starts with C1 execute, C2 mobilize, and then we get to C3 transform, which was the buzzword of, I feel like the last five years. You know, we're transforming everything. But now we have a new one. It is level four change, and it is reinvention. And I just loved when we rebrand things that are the same thing we've always talked about, but we've rebranded it, and now there's a different diagram, so it's completely new, and you need to buy from us.But there is good content in here. And you know this idea of creating value with the new identity. Talk about way easier said than done. Like every organization has an identity. When you ask someone like, what do we do here? The answer is the organization's identity and to change that is about as easy as changing an individual's identity, which is to say not at all.Organizational Identity, Leadership, and Innovation Fatigue in the Age of AI[00:03:30] Brian Ardinger: Well, and I found that part of the article actually the most intriguing because I think when you think of McKinsey, again, a lot of stuff they've focused on is how do you optimize and execute on your model? They're not very focused on reinvention. And kind of blowing it up and starting over from that perspective.So, I thought that was an interesting take, that either they have to recognize the fact that the companies that they're working with and the companies out there in general are going to have to reinvent themselves. It's no longer table stakes just to, you know, do what you've been doing and make it better, faster, stronger, cheaper.It's how do we navigate and potentially reinvent what we've done in the past. And then the other key aspect of it that really resonated with me was the fact that how do you create a culture such that change is not a drain to the organization? But as a source of energy, again, coming from a consulting background, that's often not the things you talk about.Like how do you actually create change that energizes and excites people, and provides a source of energy around what you're doing? So those are the ...
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    15 mins
  • Portfolio entrepreneurship, AI research, and brain development with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

    Portfolio entrepreneurship, AI research, and brain development with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton
    Dec 16 2025
    On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about portfolio entrepreneurship, how AI tools are transforming market research and new brain research that indicates adulthood starts later than you think. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Miles Zero's Robyn Bolton. As we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn BoltonAI Driven Innovation Trends and Founder Mindset Shifts[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me, I have Robyn Bolton from Mile Zero. Welcome, Robyn.[00:00:34] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here.Great to have you, again. This is episode 3 43 ish. We're excited to continue to talk about innovation. There's always something new and exciting to talk about.[00:00:45] Brian Ardinger: Anything going on in your world this week?[00:01:04] Robyn Bolton: I feel like this week I'm going to be spending at grading finals papers wrapped up my corporate innovation course at Boston College, and everyone submitted their finals and that's all great and they're done. And I'm now just looking at a stack of virtual digital stack of papers.[00:01:21] Brian Ardinger: At Nelnet this week we've got our Spark, which is our monthly gathering of folks. We find some interesting project and give them opportunities to sit on stage and talk about what some of the new things that are building out there. That's an opportunity to get our movers and shakers in the same room and share what's going across the different business units. So we're always excited for our Spark this week. Those are some of the things that are happening in my world. [00:01:44] Robyn Bolton: I'll happily come out and go to your Spark event, and you can grade papers. [00:01:46] Brian Ardinger: You're welcome anytime. We've got a lot of things to cover today. We've got three articles that we've curated over the last week or so. The first one we want to talk about is everyone's a founder now and it's from every, and it's a YouTube channel, and it's an interview with Henrik WerdelinPortfolio Entrepreneurship and AI Agents Reshaping StartupsAnd Henrik is a person who started Pre-Hype, started BarkBox, and he has got a new company called Audos. It's a platform that helps people use AI agents to turn ideas into profitable companies. This particular YouTube video in this interview was talking a lot about some of these new tools and how it's really changing the landscape of startups and can apply to corporate innovation as well. With these new tools, Henrick was talking about this idea of portfolio entrepreneurship, so the idea of a new breed of entrepreneurship that's shepherded in by AI.Where founders build family of products or services around the same customer instead of like one moonshot idea. So rather than coming up with Facebook and building that out, there's an opportunity now for entrepreneurs to create maybe more single, double, triple types of companies around a core set of customers that they know and can work with.And it's a variety of different projects and services that can serve that particular marketplace versus the traditional model of venture capital that we've seen out there kind of shooting for the moon. [00:03:02] Robyn Bolton: It's a really interesting video and I encourage people to go watch it. They talk about a lot in this video and you know, some of the ones that I wanna highlight, and you've already touched on this is one, what he's building with Audos. Going back to our last episode where we talked about the Mad Lib. I actually went over to Audos and you can fill in a Mad Lib for your business idea and I think in 10 minutes it built a fully functioning website, videos, everything. It was amazing. I have no idea how to edit any of it or do anything but like just the speed at which you could take a mad lib and create something that looked like a viable business was astounding.Deep Customer Focus and the Rise of Multi Product FoundersHe also talked about, as you mentioned, the importance of picking a target customer and one that you want to serve for 10 years. And he talked about with BarkBox, it was all about serving the dog owner, and most people would talk about, oh, well, you did BarkBox. Now do Meow Box, now do whatever box. And he's like, that wasn't going to work. They went from BarkBox to basically like airplanes for dogs to other things. And it was always the people who are gonna win in this new kind of world are the ones who go really deep on a very specific customer.Then kind of where this all started of the portfolio entrepreneur. He did a great job calling out VCs. Mm-hmm...
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    15 mins
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