How Do You Make Innovation Happen?

Introduction:

The wrong way to make innovation happen, Ty Hagler says in this week’s special bonus episode, is to have a great idea and then go all-in trying to create it. That, he says, is a really expensive way to find out if your idea works. The right way to pursue innovation, he says, is to take your idea to customers so you can assess the pain points and opportunity spaces before proceeding. Hagler, who is founder and CEO of Trig, an innovation and design firm in North Carolina, also says he’s learned that the problem with focus groups is that the more people you have in the room, the less valuable the conversation tends to be. In fact, he says, one-on-one is best. He also says that brainstorming remotely can actually work better than in-person. Oh, and by the way, if your Mom tells you she loves your idea and will definitely buy your product as soon as it’s available, she’s probably lying.

— Loren Feldman

Guest:

Ty Hagler is founder and CEO of Trig.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome, Ty. It’s great to have you here. Tell us about the work you do.

Ty Hagler:
Okay, thanks, Loren. I appreciate the invitation to come on. So yeah, Trig is an industrial design consulting firm. In my background, I’ve got an undergraduate degree in industrial design from Georgia Tech, and we predominantly hire industrial designers, but also visual and UX designers. And having that focus on kind of the tenets of good design, which is really about making sure that the atoms and the bits, the hardware and the software, create a cohesive experience for the end user that’s delightful, that solves meaningful problems.

We work in a couple of different industries, predominantly health care, as we think about the physical devices, in terms of what you might experience in a health care setting, then also getting into digital experiences. We’ve found opportunities in other industries where the same lessons that have applied and been successful in health care innovation have also applied in other industries.

Loren Feldman:
How did you come to specialize in the health care area? Was that by design, or did it just kind of evolve that way?

Ty Hagler:
I started out at Home Depot in their in-house innovation department, and was there from 2004 to 2008. And the 2008 housing crisis kind of made things difficult to do anything in innovation and home improvement. And I was starting Trig about the same time.

So along the way, I was also going back to school to get my MBA at N.C. State University. And one of the programs that they offer is called the Product Innovation Lab. And so they pair designers with engineers with MBA students. So, as a team, we worked on designing a device that helps people who stutter track incidences of stuttering. And so along the way, it was my first introduction to it, got exposed to it, and became absolutely fascinated by the field—and then just kept on seeking opportunities, having colleagues in the industry who would trust us to take on an aspect of medical device design. And then we’ve continued to make further investments.

It has had to be very intentional. There are a number of barriers to entry, getting into health care and medical device design, particularly when it comes to FDA and regulatory and reimbursement and all the documentation that goes into that. But at the same time, it’s also been some of the most rewarding work that I’ve had a chance to participate in in my career, because it’s life-saving equipment at the end of the day, if it functions properly. And the stories that come back for it are so much different outcomes than, say, one more consumer product.

Loren Feldman:
I think you said that you have branched off into other industries. Can you give us a couple of examples of those?

Ty Hagler:
Yeah, so the durable equipment market, particularly agricultural equipment, has been one area we’ve spent a lot of time working in. Commercial mowing equipment has been another. And then even, the complexity of building-materials manufacturing and delivery to job sites has been another industry that we’ve worked in. And what’s been interesting, particularly from the building construction standpoint, I’ve found that it’s harder to innovate in building construction than it is in health care. You would think that health care is one of the hardest places to innovate.

Loren Feldman:
You probably have clients that are quite large. What’s the range? Do you also work with solo inventors?

Ty Hagler:
Correct. We will work with aspiring entrepreneurs and all the way up to Fortune 500 companies that really have a much more narrow ask for us. So the fun thing about working with startups is that they’re all in. The work you’re doing for them matters. They have skin in the game. And so, regardless of whether we’ve made the right decision, it’s still going to market. We’re gonna get a chance to test it and see how this plays out, where I think in larger organizations, you tend to cycle through a lot more options before something actually makes it to market. And so the feedback loop that you get working with startups is probably much faster.

So one example of this: There’s a founder we worked with—a mom who had been designing a product for her kids, which was a playable jigsaw puzzle that had sensors on the back. And so it would play a sound, depending on where you put it on the play mat. And so she had been working with an engineering professor at a local university and had gotten it to a certain point.

And then she came to us and was basically asking for help to get to the next stage. And she didn’t yet have enough funding. And so, rather than take what little bit she had available, had guided her toward applying for grants and pivoting. And so then she was able to win a rather substantial STTR Grant, and then was fully able to fund the initiative and then get to that next stage—in part because she was both doggedly determined to make her idea work, and also willing to pivot and accept feedback and guidance.

Loren Feldman:
Can you give us a sense of the size of Trig?

Ty Hagler:
Yeah, so let’s see, we’ve got five full-time employees and a number of independent contractors that support us. So it’s not a large company by any means, but as a value shop, each project we take on is unique. And so the core skill we deliver is being able to offer asymmetric upside to where we’re working on projects that have potential to scale up to solve big value problems for our clients. And yet, also, our own business model doesn’t scale very well, because it’s dependent upon kind of each day showing up and being as creative as we possibly can to solve each unique problem that comes our direction. So it’s an interesting business to be in.

Loren Feldman:
How do you price your services?

Ty Hagler:
So we prefer to price based upon the value that we can deliver for the client. And usually, that depends upon the nature of the problem we’re looking at. If you’re trying to judge creative work by time put in, it runs contrary to both the mindset of creativity, but then also like, at the end of the day, you’re looking for a better creative result—not how much time did you spend thinking about something.

Because creativity comes in flashes. It doesn’t come like—I don’t know, a piece-rate type of thing where: Today I pumped out 500 widgets or 500 ideas. Rather, it’s: Yes, we produced 500 ideas, but only two of them are the ones we’re keeping. So it’s almost better to have more people looking at a problem who have varied subject matter expertise, rather than to have one designer staring at a problem for hours and hours and hours. So it’s a different economics when you’re dealing with innovation and creativity, and asymmetric upside for scalability.

Loren Feldman:
I’m wondering, how difficult was it for you to walk away from a salaried position to start your own business and dive into this full-time?

Ty Hagler:
One, I was very grateful for Home Depot. So the story going into Home Depot was, I came in as an Olympic hopeful athlete. So I had done well enough in the 2003 world championships as a flatwater kayaker and had qualified for Home Depot’s Olympic sponsorship program. And so my role within Home Depot was one where I was supposed to be an athlete, working in the stores, and then training full-time and working part-time. And so my role at Home Depot was always kind of provisional and temporary. And then I wound up making a pitch based on the sponsorship of my manager for an idea for a new product that got some interest and excitement that led to the creation of an in-house innovation group. It was trying to create a world-class innovation group within a large company and trying to train for the Olympics. It was a little too much ambition.

Loren Feldman:
That’s a pretty big leap going from being an in-house athlete to creating a division, essentially.

Ty Hagler:
Yeah, it was a wild time in my life. It was a lot of fun, but it was also intrapreneurial. And also, moving from Home Depot to starting Trig was more of a continuation of the same. I just had more autonomy with how I functioned.

Loren Feldman:
And more risk.

Ty Hagler:
A lot more risk. Absolutely. I’ve been fortunate that my wife has a more stable career than me. She’s been able to smooth out the bumps as I’ve been kind of learning how to run a business over the years.

Loren Feldman:
What did you have to figure out about running a business?

Ty Hagler:
Just sales to begin with is probably the first thing you have to figure out, because you’re going hungry. And you’ve got to rely on being able to get out there and pound the pavement and make things happen. And so, you think about your growth as a kind of early entrepreneur. And then, over time, it’s kind of figuring out how to manage other people, how to put in place, say, quarterly priorities, how to advocate and communicate a vision for the organization, how to listen to other people as they’re coming on board, and really create space for people so that it’s not just about me and my ego—but rather create a space where each individual designer coming in can see their own professional fulfillment.

I’ve got a couple of young kids. And so it’s like you’re a kid going through the creek. And you’re pulling up rocks, and you’re just so excited to pull up rocks and look under rocks, and every now and then, you find something under a rock. And you have that excitement of, “I found something.” And so you’ve got the first emotion of finding an opportunity. And the second emotion of, “Okay, well do we want to eat this?” [Laughter]

Because I then have to go back to the team and say, “Hey, guys, look what I found under a rock here.” And then there’s kind of the skepticism of, “Is this client going to be a good match for us? Is there a good fit for us here?” And so, probably not a perfect analogy, but that describes the emotion, at least of business development and trying to make sure that you’re doing a good match between the capabilities we have versus the problems and opportunities facing a potential client.

Loren Feldman:
Do you struggle at all with how much time you have to devote to that sales process versus time you can devote to actually serving clients?

Ty Hagler:
Early on, where you don’t have as much of a portfolio—and the website is usually the last thing you have time to work on—sales is such a lift. And it’s just required to get going. But we’re fortunate to have had some great projects we’ve worked on, and we’re able to showcase them on our own professional website, trig.com, to show off some of the great work we’ve done. And then also, we’ve gotten enough of the reputation in the market that we don’t have to do as much sales. Or I don’t have to do as much sales as I had done previously. It’s much more about opportunity curation. And so that’s been nice to have people come to us, rather than have to be pushing that out there.

I think one of the great things we’ve had has been a podcast I’ve been running with my co-host, Jared Gabaldon. And so that’s been an awesome opportunity just to highlight some of the stories of healthcare innovators, and I get to learn from them and give appreciation. And it also is a nice way to give to the community in a way that, if there’s a good fit, it has our name out there. And then if there’s a reciprocation that comes back, that’s been just a great way to give to the community, and then also just kind of find potential matches.

Loren Feldman:
Are there things that drive the success of the business that you’ve had to come to understand?

Ty Hagler:
I think if I’m not doing a good job of accepting the right types of clients, then it rarely gets better. I think we went through a period where we had, I think, four challenging clients all at once. And it just was bogging us down for growth, because we were basically troubleshooting poor fits and just having to get through what we had agreed to, and deliver on our commitments, and then kind of take a sigh of relief, and then go on to the next phase of it.

So there’s nothing that’s a permanent bad decision, fortunately. But it does take time to get through and realize the consequences. So I think being more choosy has been definitely a lesson learned for me over the past several years, and so we’re trying to be very diligent and intentional about which clients we choose to work with so that we can make sure that we’re delivering on our promises and adding great value.

Loren Feldman:
Do external factors have an impact on your business, whether it’s Covid, or the economy, or anything else?

Ty Hagler:
The funny thing about Covid is, I took Trig to be a fully-virtual company in 2011. And so along the way, at first, we were kind of doing the kind of hiding-it thing where we’re like, “Hey, yeah, I’ll meet you at the office.” And you go run over to like a rent-a-office space, and then we eventually started owning it. Like the only time we’re going into an office—because most of our work is done digitally through 3D CAD or design software. And so we’ve been able to function as a remote firm for a while.

So when the Covid shutdown happened, we had a full 30-person ideation session that was already planned to be run remotely through digital whiteboard software, that was around a physical product. And so we didn’t miss a beat. In fact, we had more of the company employees from this large company who attended the session because they were just trying to figure out which end was up. And here’s this new thing called a “digital ideation session.” And what’s been interesting going through that methodology and process: We found that, in certain circumstances, that type of remote ideation is more effective than in-person.

Loren Feldman:
That’s so interesting.

Ty Hagler:
Yeah, and part of that has to do with the principle called “production blocking.” So if one person is talking, you’re blocking the other person from generating ideas. And so, in a remote context, you’re making it so that—we call it “heads down, heads up”—we’ve set aside specific periods of time with very focused challenges and ask each subject-matter expert to spend 10-15 minutes focused on a very specific problem, generate as many ideas as they can. And then, we come heads up to socialize the ideas. But it allows for the introverts on the team to be just as, I guess, productive, in terms of generating ideas, as the extroverts. You have a much more well-rounded and higher performing creative group, if that’s the focus.

Now, I think, post-Covid, when we had the kind of revenge vacations and that rush back into the office, then I think there’s been much more of an emphasis on team building and culture building, which has taken it back to our roots of facilitating these in-person experiences—which is great, but I think we’ve had that flexibility through those ebbs and flows. You know, we’ve been in a sustained period of growth. I’m a perpetual pessimist, in terms of the economy, and part of it was just founding a company in 2008, which I guess will do that to you. I’m kind of waiting for the other shoe to fall.

Loren Feldman:
They say that can be a very good time to start a business, because if you can survive then, when the economy improves, you’re in great shape.

Ty Hagler:
Yeah, well, I mean, we had an extinction-level event locally, where the two major design firms here in North Carolina basically either went bankrupt or exited the local market. So that wound up providing—it’s like when a tree falls in a forest and allows for new growth to happen. I think we’ve been a beneficiary of that. But at the same time, that also has been, I don’t know, a warning sign for me that that also could be the case if you scale up too big in a business like that, and you’re too vulnerable to shocks in the future.

Loren Feldman:
How important is growth to you?

Ty Hagler:
I think it’s the right kind of growth, because I’ve become more aware of the risk of growth through just adding people and trying to do the time and materials. I think growth through creativity, though, is a more interesting pathway that I’ve been scratching my head. Meaning, if we can be more creative, in terms of the value we can deliver to our clients, where they’re seeing exponentially greater growth as a result of working with us, that’s more interesting to me than trying to have a super galactic Deathstar of having all the designers in the world working at our company. And it can be much more about having specialized designers who have a commitment to craft, where we believe in the value of good design to deliver outsize value. And then that’s something that I’m perpetually interested in and trying to figure out how to grow through, I guess, just delivering more value, as opposed to just kind of top line revenues.

Loren Feldman:
Do you have goals in mind? Do you think in terms of targets by a certain period of time?

Ty Hagler:
Yeah, I think the model that I’m most enamored with is called a venture studio. So you think about venture capital really tends to step out of the operator seat and really look for late-stage startups that already have some sales. They just need some cash to scale up. Whereas, as designers, we tend to specialize in that zero-to-one moment of going from nothing to something. And then we can even go from like one to 100 and get to more of a scale up. So for me, I’ve been interested in that venture studio model where we’re helping to originate different startups, where we believe there’s a scalable opportunity, and yet also having the humility to recognize that we’re not Elon Musk here. We aren’t going to be the ones to take it and scale it up to something that’s a full-fledged company.

Rather, we’re wanting to pass the baton off to aspiring CEOs or seasoned CEOs who are looking for that next growth opportunity, and don’t have the patience to go through the zero-to-one phase. And so, that’s the model I’ve been increasingly interested in. And you’re seeing a trend that has happened.

When I first started looking at venture studios a couple years ago, it seemed like they were fairly uncommon. And then you started to see, like, you go to your different investment forums and whatnot, it seems like every other group is setting up a venture studio. So it’s definitely an early-stage trend you see out there. But I can see how a maturation of what we’re doing, that’s a logical progression for being more of a venture designer as we mature.

Loren Feldman:
Does that suggest that you have or are open to taking investment dollars in Trig? And I’m also curious whether you ever trade your services for an equity position in a client.

Ty Hagler:
One, I think Trig itself is not set up to take investment. It’s a cash-flow business. But I think from a venture studio standpoint, it would need to take investment. Now, on the flip side, I think as we have looked at basically sweat equity deals or trading equity for reduced services, I think that we have done that in the past. And the rule of thumb that I’ve found is that startup founders who are willing to give up equity too quickly don’t understand the value of it, and therefore don’t know how to create good equity. Versus, the founders who understand the value of equity oftentimes are very reluctant to give it up. And those are the ones where you want to take equity. [Laughter] So it’s a double-edged sword there.

Loren Feldman:
It’s like a Groucho Marx thing. It’s the, “I don’t want to be a member of any club that would have me.”

Ty Hagler:
Exactly. And so you kind of need to be there at the ground floor to make sure that those starting conditions for success are there. What’s the expression: “If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re on the menu”? It’s like trying to set it up to where we’re setting the table to start with and inviting people to come sit down, and then being able to hand it off so that we don’t have to stay at the table. But at least we’ve had a chance to be part of the founding. So that’s an area that I’ve been perpetually interested in and trying to find the right path forward with it.

Loren Feldman:
It sounds like you go way beyond simply designing products or devices. You’re not just taking somebody else’s plans and executing whatever they ask you to execute. You’re getting involved, if I hear you correctly, in thinking through all sorts of ramifications, and moving much more in the direction of innovation. I’m curious, was that the intent all along? And how do you make that leap from—I don’t know what the right term would be—just the design aspect of design to the innovation part of it?

Ty Hagler:
I mean, I think it’s a matter of how much responsibility do you want to take over your work? Because if you narrow the scope of what the role of design is to, say, just aesthetics—like making pretty pictures, like playing with crayons, whatever—then it’s a narrow scope. And so, if you build up your scope to where you’re looking not just at desirability, but feasibility, viability, then you’re starting to look more broadly at: What are the implications to the business model?

Part of why I was interested in getting my MBA was just to understand the language of finance and strategy and marketing to really have a more broad sense of the scope of innovation beyond what my formal training was in product design. And it blew my mind how much went beyond what we learned in studio, going through the MBA classes. We particularly went through case study methods where I was learning about new product launches and reading these long case studies. And from a designer’s perspective, to have design be like maybe a sentence or two in an entire process was just eye-opening for me. And so it’s very helpful to understand the context. Because at the end of the day, I’m interested in the effectiveness of our work.

So, to answer your question about how you transition between design and innovation, I think design is a subset of innovation. And it’s a matter of: How much more broadly do you go into that space, when innovation itself is multidisciplinary? It’s not any one function within an organization. Rather, it’s best if it’s cross-functional. Because in this day and age, if an innovation could have been accomplished by one function, it would have already been done by now. And so you need that perspective from a lot of different stakeholders in order to deliver effective innovation. And so it’s more of making the assertion that design has something meaningful to contribute to innovation. And we teach that through a methodology that’s commonly understood as design thinking. I like to express it more as empirical creativity, of creativity in service of trial and error: looking at what works, running low risk experiments to see how the humans will respond to a new stimulus.

Loren Feldman:
We’re all familiar with examples of innovation that occurs, kind of like a lightning strike. There’s a certain amount of luck, being in the right place at the right time. You’re trying to, in a sense, force innovation, make it happen. Could you maybe walk us through an example of that? What’s a good approach to making innovation happen?

Ty Hagler:
Yeah, I mean, I’ll start with the wrong way to do it. [Laughter] Usually when we talk to a first-time founder, they get an idea. They get excited about the idea. They file a patent for it. So they’re $15,000 in the hole. And then they get the patent accepted. And they start now trying to figure out, “Well, what do I do with this patent now that I have it?” And they’re so hung up on that first idea that they’ve gotten that they’re then deciding: You know what? We’re just going to push everything into this, and then we’re going to expect that this is going to do really, really well. So we’re going to get the most expensive tooling so we can scale up on our first pass—and then get all the way to the finish line and realize nobody wants to buy their idea, even though they’ve sunk a lot of money into it. Which is, basically, a really expensive way to find out if your idea works or not.

Loren Feldman:
That all makes sense.

Ty Hagler:
Right, so that’s the wrong way to do it—or the least efficient way to do it. Let’s say that. By contrast, you could go through and spend the majority of your time trying to make sure you’re understanding what customers actually want. So go through and use empathy observation techniques to really make sure we’re understanding: what are the key pain points, what are the opportunity spaces? So we have a more clear understanding of where those gaps are. That then becomes your North Star, and then generates lots of ideas to then see: Do any of these actually match the problem?

Loren Feldman:
That sounds like a marketing function. Do you do focus groups?

Ty Hagler:
We did those early on in my career at Home Depot, and I learned a lot from focus groups. I’ve found that there’s an inverse relationship between the quality of the conversation and the number of the people in the room, meaning if you’ve got three people in a room, you’ve got less depth of a conversation than two people. And a one-on-one, an individual discussion, is much more value-added than, say, a broad-based focus group, because you just have that agreement that goes across the board. And it’s up to the facilitator to use research techniques to try to make sure you’re getting original prompts from people. But usually that’s a heads down exercise, and it takes more skill to run a focus group to get the economies of scale out of it. But usually, I’m much more interested in trying to get to a deep insight that can come through more of an informal discussion.

So my favorite book to that effect is called The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. And he has this great analogy that, if you go through and ask customers if they like your idea, they will lie to you—just like your mom would lie to you. Like, “Oh, sure, honey, I’d buy this from you.” And then you go through and build a cookbook app and nobody buys it—because your mom was lying to you. Because she wanted to not hurt your feelings. And so from a research technique standpoint, it’s great because you are more interested in past behavior and what people have actually spent money on in the past versus anything that’s a future-focused question or trying to ask people to speculate on the future, which is not useful at all, from an innovation standpoint.

Loren Feldman:
I didn’t mean to sidetrack you with the question about focus groups, but it did strike me that you’re getting involved in a lot of different things that we don’t traditionally think of as design.

Ty Hagler:
Well, it’s a key input. So the two inputs to good design are the research—the customer insights. Do we understand the customer problem? And have we asked it in the right way? Just getting a survey result that says, “Here’s the demographic profile of the people that responded to this,” isn’t helpful. It’s asking for research in the right way. There are a couple of techniques that I’m a fan of.

Also, another key input for good design is brand. If we’re working with a company that has no brand, then trying to design for that company is much harder than if we’re working with an established company with an established brand. Then we can fit into their visual brand language smoothly, and we’ve got a key target to work toward. So those are the two big inputs we have to be aware of as a key part of running a successful design program.

Loren Feldman:
It’s interesting you would rather work with somebody who has an established brand than somebody who has a blank slate where you would perhaps have more freedom.

Ty Hagler:
So there’s a quote here with creative freedom that comes from Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching, where it’s not the pot itself, but it’s the emptiness inside that makes it useful. And so this speaks to basically the analogy that creativity is like hot water. If you don’t have constraints on it, then you pour it on the table, it just makes a mess that goes everywhere. But if you have a tea pot, then you’re able to put some tea into it. You can have a nice cup of tea that’s creative, bounded, and useful. And so I’m a big fan of putting constraints in place.

So if there’s not a brand, we run a brand process to help establish the brand, get it going, and make sure there’s enough of the brand in place to where the product launch is cohesive. We want to make sure that the product and the identity, the website, the messaging, the vision for the company are all cohesive. Because at the end of the day, brand is about making promises and keeping promises, and the product is a key attribute of that.

Loren Feldman:
You’ve talked about working with large clients and working with very small companies or individual founders. Is there a middle ground as well? Do you get established businesses trying to go in a different direction coming to you as well?

Ty Hagler:
Yes, in those cases, there’s more maturity in the functional groups to where we can take on aspects of it. In some cases, we’ll be responsible for running an aspect of their design group. Within startups, we’re kind of helping to run the entire creative side of their business, whereas with middle groups, we’re more working to solve a more narrowly constrained problem. Whereas with large groups, our scope is even more constrained and specialized. And so it’s just a matter of matching the gaps in the organization to what we can offer that would add value.

Loren Feldman:
How many projects can you handle at once? You don’t have a huge team, obviously. What’s a reasonable workload?

Ty Hagler:
I’ve been trying to have our workload narrowed down to about seven clients at a given time. There was a point in time where we had ramped up to about 30 different clients, but the individual project size was small. And that became very challenging to provide consistency and deeply understanding what the mission is for each one of those and to create good value when they’re small projects where the value proposition is still being discovered.

Loren Feldman:
Can you teach innovation?

Ty Hagler:
So yes, you can teach it. Entrepreneurship, I think, is harder to teach than innovation. Because innovation, in its own right, is a process. When you’re running it smoothly, it requires attention to detail running a set of steps. It’s kind of like learning how to play jazz, where you’re running a set of chord progressions, to learn basically whether or not a given idea will work. And you’ve got enough runway, and you’ve got enough shots on goal from an innovation context where you can do that. By contrast, with entrepreneurship, I think that’s much more of a personality disorder [Laughter] where you’re willing to take obscene risks to go after an idea that, by definition, has never been tried before. And you don’t have a safety net underneath you.

Loren Feldman:
Well, that’s not always true, when you say an idea that’s never been tried before. I mean, that certainly exists in entrepreneurship. It’s not your only choice.

Ty Hagler:
Right, right. You can buy into franchises and whatnot.

Loren Feldman:
Or start an individual business that is in an industry where there are competitors that do similar things.

Ty Hagler:
Sure, absolutely. And do a fast-follower strategy and come in with a better cost structure. Absolutely. I do think, though, that entrepreneurship takes a certain level of, I don’t know, individual autonomy and self-agency that doesn’t exist very commonly. And it’s definitely something that is a unique personality profile for somebody who’s willing to do that. As opposed to, I think, where innovation is much more collaborative by nature, and yet also doesn’t require so much risk-taking at an individual level, if that makes sense.

Loren Feldman:
It does. I guess, to me, innovation feels more exotic than entrepreneurship and harder to grasp. And you’re kind of saying the opposite.

Ty Hagler:
Yeah, because innovation in its own right is really dealing with the new and the novel, but it’s also something that is adjacent to an existing organization. Whereas entrepreneurship is innovation, plus having to get a whole company off the ground—at least that’s how I think about it.

Loren Feldman:
My thanks to Ty Hagler, CEO and founder of industrial design firm Trig. This episode was brought to you by the Great Game of Business, which helps businesses use an open-book management system to build healthier companies. You can learn more at greatgame.com.