[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's coffee with Digital Trailblazers. We're just having a fun discussion as I am here at my home today and we'll be broadcasting next week's session here from my home and then after that I will be in Berlin the week of first November 1st through 8th and currently planning to do the November 7th coffee hour from Berlin and hoping it all works out. But we're all joking here because the 11am time slot in the Eastern time zone is 5pm over in Berlin and we'll just need to figure out if we need to rebrand the coffee hour to something more appropriate like beer or Oktoberfest for digital trailblazers or something like that. We have a full house today, some special guests that I'll announce in a few seconds seconds just waiting for everybody to be able to join in our conversation today which is going to be about the co creation mandate, how partnerships accelerate innovation and talent readiness and I'll just give you a sense of how I'm picking topics out a little bit now. I'm looking at things that are have always been part of digital transformation efforts, whether it's we did a session a few weeks ago around innovation versus governance and how do you balance the two.
We've done sessions around change leadership and how change management is changing because of the speed and the capabilities of AI.
And I wanted to cover the notion of the co creation mandate, the idea partnering because we're still have this, I would say antiquated mindset that when it comes to new capabilities it's a build versus buy decision.
And I think that low code environments really sat and created a gray area between those two extremes.
Over the last 15 years we've had to help our organizations break through the mindset that when we bring in partners when we're not necessarily outsourcing, we are also looking for other opportunities to partner to develop capabilities together.
And more and more often I'm hearing the word co creation come up from more people. And so I thought we'd talk about the co creation mandate today.
And I will tell you, the first time I wrote about this was going all the way back to my first book, Driving Digital. And if you open up chapter two of Driving Digital, I share a practice I built as CIO of McGraw Hill. How do you partner with an offshore partner around Agile development and what roles do you need from employees and what roles do you need from your partner? And how do you deal with situations where you're co creating on technology and your partners bring technology expertise and other times when maybe you have a stable set of technologies and you're partnering with a partner around user experience, around marketing, around the ability to reconceive a new way of delivering capabilities to your end users, whether it's customers or employees. And you're bringing a partner in for an outside in perspective. So I'm excited today have two special guests.
I have my, my regular speakers. Joanne is here, Joe is here, Martin's here.
Who else? Derek is here, Heather is here. I think we'll see Liz a little bit yet later they say Joe and Martin. Yeah, all of us are here.
But I invited two partners of my company Star CIO to come join us today.
I want you to meet for the first time on stage Juanita Og.
Juanita, how do you pronounce your last name? I should have asked you this.
Ogin Juanita just joined Star cio. I was a client of hers in a past life and Juanita is joining Star CIO as our go to market leader.
And Jay Cohen who has been on the program a number of times. Jay and I have worked together all the way back to McGraw Hill. He remembers those days of putting Agile in place. And Jay is a digital transformation leader over @Star CIS.
Juanita obviously focusing on marketing, Jay focused on delivery. And we're all focused on how do we work with partners, how do we break the mindset of build versus buy versus outsourcing.
And Juanita, I'm going to start with you and just get your perspective. What are some of the key differences and development principles when you're working with a partner, particularly in innovation and even getting into AI. Juanita, welcome to the floor today.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Thank you. Very happy to be here. I think this is such an interesting topic. So I'm glad you are, you know, you're welcoming it today.
From my view, I just want to say I don't know how you cannot think about partnering generally speaking.
And the biggest I think live example we're all seeing on a regular basis are the folks at OpenAI who every day it seems are announcing a new partnership, right. A new company that they're working with to integrate their technology. And so I think just having that partnership or co creation mindset is so important because also you're, you're getting other people's perspectives and experiences and it's kind of like growing the network effects, if you will. So from my view, you know, partnership, I've worked in many different capacities. I've launched new products that are partnered, packaged so that you know, you're, you're that's a joint go to market approach where both, you know, the, the partner that you're selling their tech and the company's tech, both are benefiting. I worked with reseller partners, right, that are increasing your just your reach in the market.
So I think understanding, like what you need is important, what the business needs and you know, what you're trying to do. Are you trying to launch a new product and go to market together or are you considering a white label? So those are some of the things that come to mind for me. But I think the most important part is I think you have to be open to getting, you know, feedback and input from others. And I just think anytime you bring someone else in your, your work is going to be that much better.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: So we're introducing the part, the notion of getting feedback and I love bringing up this idea of joint development. If you're working in enterprises, that's a common tool used when you need to build something, but you may not necessarily want to own it and your partner becomes not only a source of expertise and innovation, but a way of scaling the idea and ultimately monetizing the idea beyond what you can do inside your enterprise. So really good insights. Juanita. Jay, welcome to the floor. We talk about co creation and development principles that are a little bit different than build, buy and outsourcing. What comes to mind, Jay?
[00:07:43] Speaker C: I think that part of co creation is basically the moving forward or the mutual invention.
I think that it exacerbates and especially in today's age, with the age of AI, I think that no one really innovates alone.
I think that part of co creation is a competitive advantage because it turns the whole notion of collaboration into capability and capability into continuous innovation. And I think through continuous innovation you're able to and organizations are able to be on the edge of both technology, data consolidation, et cetera. That enables both individuals, teams and companies to move much faster and in a more efficient manner.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Thank you, Jay. I love the statement no one innovates alone.
That is a statement, Joanne, that I think we have to get better at explaining to our stakeholders who, when they finally get the sense that there's some investment in an area where they want to deliver value, they take their wish lists and try to sometimes squeeze it down the throat of the teams that are innovating and are not looking outside in, in terms of places they can learn from. So Joanne, welcome back and I hope you have some great insights for us today about co creating.
[00:09:32] Speaker D: Yeah, I think first of all, two things I posted it off of off of myself because I couldn't get it to post off of the LinkedIn Live event. But I just put a little chart up that talks about the four different models. So if somebody can figure out how to get it into the comments on the on your stream, be my guest.
Co creation models take on flavors of their own.
One of the most important aspects of it is if you're going down the road of innovation through a co creation of partnership, strategic alliance, whatever term you want to reference with that. One of the biggest concerns is intellectual property protection.
And I think that's to your point, Isaac, people inside who are, you know, maybe sort of fractious team teams, meaning they're across the organization, they may have slightly different agendas. Some people will push for one thing versus another in the co creation model is we have to be, especially with AI, really, really careful about the intellectual property of people and also the ownership of data in the organization.
So I'm not suggesting that co creation is a bad way to go. I'm just saying that there are different rule types that need to be applied. And while co creation can lead to very interesting outcomes, especially in AI like small language development or small language model development, how you go about getting precision from agents and agentic AI, all of those kinds of things which drive productivity faster. And I know Martin will definitely have something to say about change management and productivity.
But the efficacy of co creation can't be outdone by buy a loan or build alone.
[00:11:32] Speaker A: You know, you're just not going to.
[00:11:34] Speaker D: Get from here to there.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: Joanne, I wish we had a legal expert here because you're bringing up sort of the, some of the hurdles that companies face when they're thinking about co creating, IP protection, data ownership, privacy issues, conflict, you know, conflict resolution, which you try to get some of that resolved up front.
And so we bring in for all the right reasons, our legal teams. Our security expert Derek is going to join us in a few seconds. And this great idea of partnering and co creating, particularly when we starting to do things like joint development efforts like Juanita had recommended and now you have sort of this entire legal hurdle to get through. And I'm wondering maybe we need this as a follow up is getting a legal expert around how do you take that mountain and turn it into a small hill?
[00:12:26] Speaker D: Yeah, I, I think particularly with, with AI and the fact that you can use a frontier model like gen AI or Anthropic or whatever, choose your flavor and then you're adding to that or you're using part of that and Then you have the two intellectual property or intellectual capital issues of the co creation partners or consortium even.
It becomes very difficult to separate the wheat from the chafe. And it also makes it.
It's not just that kind of a hurdle, it's a cultural hurdle. Just as well.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: Also consider the cultural hurdle. Seems like a handoff to Martin.
Martin, how do we make. What are some of the things you think of when we're co creating?
[00:13:12] Speaker E: Well, I think yeah, you're dead right in terms of the change management aspects. You've got to get past the not invented here. Yeah, you need a team that's working closely with your partners.
So some of those cultural pieces are very, very, very special, very specific.
Elaborating. On the IP side of things, the intellectual property side, there's a number of different aspects of that to think about. The one aspect is what background IP is going to be shared by both parties or multiple parties involved agreeing up front, what are you going to provide of your existing IP into the partnership?
Then what happens with new foreground ip?
Are you actually going to share who's going to own that ip, et cetera. So having a strong plan upfront really helps a lot about how you're going to do that. And then it gets down to, are you going to patent some of this information that may come out of this partnership? And if you're going to patent it, where are you going to patent it? Yeah, it costs a lot of money to paint it in every single country around the world. But what are maybe the main markets where you're going to need patent protection? So for example, patenting in US is always a good idea. That covers a lot of the North American side of things, etc. Patenting somewhere in Europe, maybe Germany or something like that will give you a fair amount of coverage across Europe, even if you only do it in one country. And patenting in China. Yeah, so some of those aspects you have to consider, you have to kind of really get into those thoughts. And then I want to just go somewhere slightly different as well, which is how to think about co creation. Yeah, we've been talking about some physical things and a lot of technology stuff just now, but I did some work with a large fry producer and they were partnering with startups in the use of technology in the agricultural space for identifying for example, pests on potato plants and using drones and remote cameras to identify things that were going on with the leaves on the actual plants, identifying the types of fungus, bug or whatever it might be, and then using robotic sprayers that Target individual plants and apply the only the amount of chemical needed for that particular plant in order to treat that condition on the plant rather than blanket spraying a whole field. So yeah, just to think of something slightly differently in terms of what co creation might be.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: We're getting into some interesting use cases today around co creation. We've covered a little bit around joint development efforts. I think I want to table that expert discussion because I think it opens up a can of hurdles to get through Martin's bringing up co creating with startups, which I think is really interesting. In fact, I think that's interesting enough where we will do a follow up discussion.
They have technical expertise, you have use cases, you have customers, you have data for them, you have dollars. It can be a match made in heaven when there's a good partner and a good collaboration model. I think there's another area we could cover also in co creation with nonprofits who need expertise.
And you might have talent that needs to learn new technologies or new ways of working.
And one way of training them is with Start is having them work with a nonprofit on a pro bono basis. There's a lot of ways that we can think about what the partnership model looks like. When I was conceiving this one, Joe, I was thinking about just as simple as I know I need to invest in AI.
My team doesn't have expertise in AI, my data needs a lot of work.
There's AI interest across the company and now I want to be able to do more with greater expertise. And I'm going to say I probably need some help doing that. So Joe, from that perspective, how do you think about what are the ingredients to making a co creating model work?
[00:17:47] Speaker F: Well, Martin stole my thunder because I was going to bring up the investors collaborative.
As you know, I, I run a partnership where we do invest in startup companies.
And the reason that I got involved with that organization in the first place was as a cio, I always had my eye on interesting new technologies in the startup space because it gave me an opportunity to steer. If I invested in that startup, I could steer their direction. I could make them, you know, prioritize things which were more important to me.
And I had first mover advantage. I was able to use that technology ahead of other companies. So it gave me a little bit of a competitive advantage. And on top of that I'm mitigating risk and I'm minimizing the resources of the company towards, towards this, you know, innovative idea or this new, new objective.
So there were a lot of reasons why I Thought startups were of interest and that's how I got in the game in the first place.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: Thank you. Joe. What are some of the ingredients you look for when you see.
Let's just keep in your context a startup that might be a good place to do some experimenting with.
How do you know it's going to be a good fit for your company?
[00:19:10] Speaker F: Well, you have needs. The company has specific needs. I think an earlier example about the agriculture application, we had something similar in the hospital cleaning room space where the company ultimately invested in a robotic device which would go and sanitize a hospital room after a patient was, was removed. You know, we were in the business of cleaning rooms, but the business was based on wipes. So you had to have manual labor, you had to have somebody go in and actually wiped down with the pre moistened wipes to disinfect. And here was a completely new technology that allowed us to position a robot in a room, get everybody out of the room, close the door and have it, using ultraviolet light, sanitize the entire room. So when you have a specific need and you can obtain technology that furthers your mission as a company, your cause that, that's, that's a match made in heaven.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: So it's almost like co creating with a company that has the lab and the equipment to be able to do experimentation. Can I kind of expand on that, Joe?
[00:20:32] Speaker F: I'm not sure what you mean.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: Well, so when I think about manufacturing. Okay. And I think about building new products out and I think about this, does the manufacturer have all the resources to experiment with a new product type? And I think that's a wonderful area to be able to look for partners on who can go through multiple iterations, multiple ways of manufacturing something, multiple product ideas in, you know, in a fixed timeline, not necessarily a fixed cost, but in a fixed timeline, come up with several different prototypes.
[00:21:14] Speaker F: Yeah, no, no, absolutely. I mean we, we were in the business of manufacturing wipes. We had nothing to do with robotics. We had no, you know, no expertise in that area whatsoever.
But it was achieving the same ultimate objective as the product we sold. So this was a better way of delivering the service and the value to our customers.
It was invented, but it was technology in search of a problem.
And so the combination was what was magic about it.
[00:21:52] Speaker A: Awesome. Let's bring Derek and then we'll bring Heather on Derek.
We already got a good list of things to watch out for.
So as our compliance and security leader, what should we, what do we need to add to this list?
[00:22:06] Speaker G: I guess no, it's a great, great discussion so far. I mean the things that Joanne and Martin brought up concerning intellectual property and Joe talking about risk, you know those things go back to. For me it's accountability. When you're talking about co creation of these type of services, there's a sharing, accountability, sharing of security by design, security and threat modeling, but also the alignment of ethical AI practices as artificial intelligence will be used to help with this development and this co creation. And I think when they look at that and trying to build that, it's really looking at what kind shared resources, shared AI labs, AI threat intelligence services they can work with together to better understand how they can co create, how they can also leverage and both of them being responsible for the risk that may come or may not come out of this.
They need to understand, you know, having strong service level agreements to work between them to protect all the different entities from the business, the cultural and the legal aspects, those are going to be key things going to come in and doing this and they all have to be kind of checked up front. You don't want to jump into it and kind of figure it as you go along. But I think taking the time to really understand the measurement, the alignment and what the outcome is going to be to move forward is going to help them get to where they need to be with the co creation of the products they're trying to move forward.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: Derek, I'm going to sidebar and ask you this one question because I think it stumbles a lot of companies and it's, you know, you get to the point where you've signed up a partner, maybe it's a co creation partner or just another partner you're working with and the complexity and timing to onboard that partner to get them plugged into your network in a secure way to get permissions, configured to get licensing, configured in a way that they are operating within policies but effectively and efficiently with your team. It seems like every company still has hurdles around this.
What do they have to have right up front so that the onboarding process doesn't take six months in itself?
[00:24:01] Speaker G: Well, I guess it goes starts with setting up realistic expectations based on those policies, procedures, the governance and the legal aspect they need to go through. If it's something that's brand new to them, they're trying to figure it out as they go. But if it's a company that's worked with acquisitions and mergers and other things of that nature and bringing in those resources, they're going to have some sort of semblance of what it's going to take to bring these services in and what the timeline is going to make to happen. And a lot of times I see companies fail because they try to do it in parallel as opposed to doing it up front and then they realize they've introduced more risk than what expected because they haven't clearly defined those lines of engagement and they haven't defined those, those guardrails in which they should stay away from. So you know, taking the time to do it up front first is going to help them be more efficient. It's going to help the progress move more smoothly. But you know, those realist expectations, I think a lot of companies kind of forego or kind of not really take time to understand and that's where they fall short.
[00:24:56] Speaker A: Thank you, Derek. Heather, welcome to the floor. There is one one question in the comments.
This is from our friend Kanaya. I don't know if you want to potentially comment on this, but he asked about co leadership as one of the topics to discuss. I don't know if you or Joanne is also raising her. Maybe one or both of you want to comment on that. I think that basically means it's very easy to say co creation and from the perspective that you are leading it and your partner is a partner on it. But when you're co creating, creating with a real partner, there is an element of co leadership that you have to discuss, where the boundaries are.
Heather, welcome to the floor.
[00:25:40] Speaker H: Thank you. I'll address that first and then I'll just make some other comments. I think it's always about the guardrails and the delegation of whose responsibility is whose because if you're co leading, you don't want to step on your partner's toes.
If there's a contribution that you can make, make sure you do it in an appropriate way. You know, so often there's so much common sense that's involved that people seem to forget.
How do you message? How do you communicate? How do you get your point across? How do you make a contribution and doing that in a way that is respectful, Especially if someone is a leader just like you, you're no better or worse than they are.
So being able to communicate that soundly. And I think my other comment was about we talk about the co creation of entities or of products or of services and all of that is a function of people. And the more that you can have an expansion of people, whether it's the talent pool grows and you bring in creativity and it's not just who you have that you know, in your small world.
And this extends also to buy, sell and outsource. You're opening up the whole world and being able to access and consider the talent elsewhere.
And then you can get that external knowledge that you didn't have.
And then of course, and I think Derek and others mentioned this about sharing resources, sharing costs is all very helpful in, in a co creation model.
[00:27:19] Speaker A: Thank you. Let's move on to Joanne and I'll take my break and we'll move into innovation and talent readiness. Hello Joanne.
[00:27:27] Speaker D: Hey.
One of the things that I wanted to mention that I didn't quite hear and maybe I, I, it was nuanced more than obvious, but one of the things that's really helping companies move forward, particularly with AI, is they're introducing another level of structure around what do they do first and how did they move innovation forward, meaning AI innovation.
And that's around the idea that you have to look at outcomes to be achieved. For sure, that's the value. But you also need to start measuring complexity versus criticality because some things will take a lot longer than others.
And the criticality is how much of a business driver is it to either profitability, resiliency or bottom line cost savings versus the complexity of it. If it's going to take you a year to do and it's critical, find another way to do some of it up front. In other words, break the bigger tasks down into those that are perhaps a little bit less complex or those that are more critical versus less critical because you can always iterate. And that's what I think a lot of companies are starting to realize that they did wrong with their first iterations of AI.
Those that got stuck in POCL and couldn't make either the scalability target or the productivity targets that they expected to have the results for.
[00:29:09] Speaker A: So I'm translating this Joanne. Unrealistic expectations may be overly demanding, complex ideas to your co creation partner. And then stuck in POC abyss of trying to, to actually make ends meet. Is that sort of.
[00:29:28] Speaker D: Yeah, kind of it. Well, put it this way, like take something like something that we're going through the customer now, which is they have a very convoluted business process that evolved over a period of time that they're now trying to put not only AI into, but they have two goals. Let's say it's cost and time oriented. One is reduce the cost overall and the other is speed the time to value. And in those in that particular instance, there are some parts of it that are really, really complicated to get the data for to build the, the, the right kind of stochastic modeling to be able to deliver AI, forget about the quality of the data, the data quality issue in and of itself will probably take them a year to solve, but with what is available even in spreadsheets, because there's a critical nature and margins are at stake and market share is at stake, take that component, do that first, wherever you can, even if it still has to have human in the loop or human sort of decision making as part and parcel of that overall AI initiative. Break things down to get the productivity gains that you want to achieve the overall goal. So this is something that more and more companies are starting to look at their overall overall AI strategy and say, can I, can I start breaking it down into smaller chunks even if I have to iterate? Because this is going to bring me the value that most people are not seeing. And this is where to Joe's point. First mover advantage comes in in a co creation model because now you have a larger group of people focusing on chunks, no pun intended to the LLMs. But literally speaking, you're working as in a, in a non standard development way, almost the way we used to do feature and function. You know, I'll do these features and functions first, then I'll add on later as part of my product roadmap.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: Joanne, you're reminding me of what it's like to really sit down with a, in a ground floor opportunity with your startups and you bring two or three people in, hopefully from very different expertise, different experiences and the very first thing you need to really home in on is, is you know, your strategy, your business model, your, your target customer list. You're going to do a lot of things before you even start conceiving what the product looks like.
And it's, you know, for those of you who have not done co creation before, that's an important starting point. Right. And I started from the notion of retraining our stakeholders because co creation is not just about finding partners and getting skilled folks to come join your team to get a specific job done. Joanne is getting at some of the risks with that, which is your expectations of what you want to build may outpace the cost or complexity or timeline or level investment or even the skills of the people you're partnering with. So if going to call it co creating, better start with a clean piece of paper and saying let's brainstorm this out together and seeing where, where this nets out. And that's one of our best practices at Star CIO for working through co creation with our partners. I have two of our two of our guests here, Juanita and Jay. You'll be speaking next.
We have done co creation quite a bit in our own journeys and when we come back after our break, we'll be talking about how do you use co creation to accelerate innovation and how do we use co creation to really accelerate our talent readiness? How do we get our teams to learn from our partners while we're actually doing the work? Folks, thank you for joining this week's Coffee with Digital Trailblazers. I think many of you know we meet every week at 11:00am Eastern Time to discuss topics of interest for those of you leading digital transformation and increasingly more AI efforts in your organization.
I have the next month's episodes up for you in the whiteboard. Next week we'll be talking about AI agents at work, the IT and HR alliance to Drive Adoption. On the seventh in on that week is Stress Awareness Week. We'll talk about how digital trailblazers reduce stress in their organizations, teams and for themselves.
On the 14th I will be broadcasting hopefully from Berlin, Germany. I will talk about I'm sorry that I'll be doing that on the 7th. On the 14th it will be AI for social good insights from nonprofit CTOs. I'm looking for nominations.
This will be just before giving Tuesday and be trying to get a group of ctos in non profits who are versed in using AI for Social good. So if you have nominations, please do message out to me on the 21st digital to AI natives how Gen Z is using Gen AI.
We're going to look for some ways to learn from our younger participants. And then on the 28th for Thanksgiving we will be skipping our session. So please mark your calendar and then do visit drive.starcio.com Coffee and that link will take you to the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers page. You can get a click on the button to add it to your calendar and many of our recordings are available there. Some of them are available on poll on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. But if you want access to all of our episodes, do join the Star CIO Digital Trailblazer community and you can find out more about
[email protected] cio.com community okay Juanita, we're bringing you back. We're going to give everybody a chance to comment on one of these two areas or maybe both. I really want to talk about why we're accelerate, why we're co creating and there are a couple of areas that seem to be very universal. One of them is to just accelerate our ability to innovate.
I want to talk about how organizations can co create on AI that leads to smarter expectation and more realized business outcomes. So one side let's talk about the benefit around accelerating innovation and on the other side, let's talk about our talent. Right. One of the things I used to coach my teams on is that when you have experts coming in, when you have partners coming in, don't outsource that work yourself. Sit alongside them, learn from them, ask questions and start learning on the job so that you have a, you know, you have some better expertise around the AI or around the application development or around the marketing strategies that you can put to work later on down the road. So I think co creating is another way of educating our teams and our talent around new areas that we're moving into as organization.
Juanita, which one do you want to comment on for us today?
[00:36:56] Speaker B: I'll talk about maybe the accelerating innovation and possibly add in some thoughts on talent there. Sure, yeah. So I think one of our attendees, lots of great conversation today, but one word that sticks out here for me is scale. And the reality is that a lot of teams and companies already have a lot on their plate, especially if you're a product manager, you have the entire existing portfolio to maintain, to manage product life cycles and all of that. But the pace of innovation as we know, is not going to slow down, it's just, it's moving faster. And so there's just no way, I think that teams can really stay on top of managing the existing big portfolios they have as well as then trying to bring in new innovations without partnering and co creating. And one good way I've seen this work for teams is to have a separate labs team as an example that is focused purely on the innovations, on the testing on those prototypes. But the labs team and the product teams have to work hand in hand. Right. Because as we know, prototypes aren't, you know, the full finished product. They, they need to be productized at some point. But having this separate labs team that can, you know, try different technology, that can maybe manage some of those external partnerships that can quickly work to demonstrate use cases, I think is a really great approach to this. And when done well, then, you know, there's a fast turnaround time to actually ship a product out to market that's been tested right. Internally with maybe some existing customers. So I just think about it from that perspective. Like I know these product teams just already have so much on their plate. So having this extra team to bring in that innovative mindset and capacity is a good way to approach this.
And I also agree with you, Isaac. I think when it, when we think about talent and upskilling, you know, there's a lot of expertise out there with partners. Different companies have their own specialty areas of specialty or subject matter expertise.
And I don't think companies should shy away from, you know, taking that time to learn from them or even getting those partners to come and speak to teams and, you know, directly. Because sometimes if you're, you know, if you're an existing, if you're, when you, when you speak to your company internally, sometimes it may not resonate as much as bringing in an external subject matter expert who is going to say the same things and bring a different perspective.
[00:39:40] Speaker A: Thank you, Juanita. I love. We're now getting into the branching into labs as a way of learning.
And I know we've covered innovation labs before with Roman.
Jay, I want your perspectives. We walked into many organizations that their aspirations outpace their ability to execute. Sometimes it's a scaling factor, sometimes it's an expertise factor.
Where do you want to take us, Jay, on either accelerating innovation or talent readiness?
[00:40:15] Speaker C: Yeah, I think both of them real quick. I think like in today's day and age, technology moves faster than an organization's comfort level.
So I think through co creation partners, they can play a crucial role in preparing talent, not just technically, but culturally.
Some of the items, you know, that you talked about, Isaac, is let's say around learning in context. Right. So instead of detached training programs, I think that co creation basically helps to embed learning in live projects. I also think that from a change acceleration perspective, an external partner can potentially, and we did this on our last project, we bring a neutral facilitation basically that we helped break the internal resistance to what we were looking to accomplish there.
And I also think that many organizations in today's day and age, or many people and professionals, especially on LinkedIn, you have to think about the human centric transformation.
So I think that in today's day and age, with fears of job loss, co creation can reframe AI as augmentation. I think it can create opportunities for reskilling of new hybrid type of roles, such as a prompt engineer or a model steward or a human in the loop designer.
That didn't exist before the mass discussion around AI.
[00:41:59] Speaker A: I love this idea of partnering to change a culture, especially when the leader is involved in getting the organization to realize that new partners are going to bring in new ideas and challenge people's thinking.
Heather, love your thoughts. Are we Talking about talent readiness, Are you talking accelerating innovation? I have a feeling you talk about talent.
[00:42:23] Speaker H: Yes, indeed. And I think that Jay was totally spot on. When you have a foster, fostering a collaborative mindset, so many things can happen with the fear of people losing their job to AI. This really could be a whole media approach that, no, you don't have to lose your job. There's a way of learning through doing, learning through your partners, learning through experience. And this gives, and it speaks to a little bit of one of your sessions coming up later on.
Have employee engagement, reduces stress.
So if there's a way that you can bring people in and realize that there is a future, there is something that's coming up that is not, not everything is so negative and I'm going to lose my job and things are just going to be awful. But it has to be a cultural mindset, whether it is for collaboration or learning or upskilling, but it has to be a whole change that a lot of companies are not accustomed to having and not accustomed to promoting.
[00:43:25] Speaker A: Derek, thank you, Heather. I'm going to keep putting my experts on the spot. Derek, I'm going to put you on the spot here and go into a situation with you, which is when a business leader comes to us and says, I want to partner with company X to do Y, and you look at that company at the surface level and you have a lot of question marks about whether they are a good partner.
[00:43:53] Speaker G: Partner.
[00:43:54] Speaker A: I'm wondering how you walk through that, you know, challenging yourself, are your instincts right? Or putting that partner through the right initial set of questions to flush out whether they're the right partner to either accelerate innovation or build up your talent around the areas that you're partnering on.
[00:44:14] Speaker G: Yeah, I mean, the first thing I would do is look at, you know, what are the strengths this other company would bring in and at the same time, what are the risks they're also going to introduce.
And I think by looking at both of those, you're going to figure out where's the middle ground that we can actually innovate and work together, you know, in the shared type environments, these shared laboratories, these shared threat intelligence, these, you know, when you talk about the, the two entities coming together, you know, and you want to create this product, you know, you want to do something in a quick or rapid prototyping type level. And I need to look at what are all the things associated with, from compliance, ethical checks, security, all these things come into play and I need to understand what been their background, ethical or moral compass in the in the past and do they share the same venue that we have? You know, these are all kind of things to figure out. Is it going to be a good fit for the business culture? Are we introducing something that's going to be totally misaligned? And I think that alignment outcome is going to be important because you need to understand, you know, everybody's trying to figure out how can we introduce these things without introducing risk and still developing resilience. And as Heather mentioned, the mindset is going to be important for all of this to reduce the time it's going to take to get a final product but also get that creativity flowing so we don't hinder the process. And I think as part of that, as Heather mentioned also about the job creation, when you bring all these two entities together, what other new roles? So anytime you're working in an environment where you're doing the rapid prototyping the developers and everybody's heads down, so you're going to introduce new roles such as looking at AI risk analysis or AI threat model and auditory to kind of people understand what's taking place. And these can come together from both sides but need to understand what are the strengths they're bringing in from both sides to make that work. And the upscaling part of it for both entities will really work.
But again, it all has to be laid out up front and not kind of figured as you go along.
[00:46:03] Speaker A: Derek, Derek, I'm going to, you know, I think you nailed on the two things, right? Strengths and understanding risks. For me, you know, when I sit in the room with a potential partner, I want to see that I they are, I am learning something that I didn't know and learning a lot and are they explaining it well?
And you know, I am asking them questions about risk. Why? Because that's something I expect them to be four or five steps ahead of us and I'm expecting them to be able to share, you know, what are some of the trade offs and the design decisions or how are they going to test ideas.
If we're focusing on a customer experience, for example, I want them to be a few steps ahead of me and if they are, they have a lot to offer and if they can explain it well, then I know they're ready to work with my team around talent readiness. Joanne?
[00:46:52] Speaker G: Absolutely.
[00:46:52] Speaker A: Joanne accelerates innovation or talent readiness. Where do you want to go?
[00:46:59] Speaker D: Accelerate innovation and talent either or, but more the acceleration.
[00:47:05] Speaker A: Joanne's accelerate innovation for 1000. Go ahead.
[00:47:10] Speaker D: So first of all, I think, you know, one of the things that I'm beginning to realize more and more is the executive mindset has to shift.
It's not about sponsorship, it's not about dollars. It's the shift that you're moving from what used to be called knowledge workers and knowledge management into a knowledge ecosystem.
And as you choose your partners, it's not just about what you can learn from them or how far ahead of you they are.
The tips and tricks and nuances, especially with AI, are even more important. Like when I look at risk, you know, from a point of view of partnering with another company, for example, it's what areas can you fill that I cannot?
And how does that really work for me and my customers versus you know, just fulfilling a particular need? You can have the greatest developers in the world, but if they have no experience in a particular field, that doesn't really qualify them, you know. And then by the opposite token, you can have deep subject matter expertise, but if those ideas do not translate out of that one part of any a bigger picture, that's a risk that you don't necessarily want to take.
So we have to sort of train the executive around the notion that we're in a knowledge ecosystem, that knowledge can come from different places, that data creates the knowledge, but it's the context around everything that really counts. So if you want to accelerate innovation, context is queen.
Content may be king, but context is queen. And that those contexts have to be looked at from various perspectives, various roles and in the bigger picture of your knowledge ecosystem. Otherwise you're going to find yourself partnering with a variety of companies over a period of time. And that's not necessarily the one plus one plus one does not equal three situations.
[00:49:22] Speaker A: Thank you, Joanna. I think that's another great area of deep diving in. Right. Who are your partners? Who do you work with?
Particularly when you're co creating and looking at an implementation partner, I'm going to want to make sure that they have some expertise or partners with expertise in the platforms that I'm probably going to have to integrate with. So really good data point there. Joanne Martin, talent or innovation?
[00:49:52] Speaker E: I'm gonna go with the talent for a thousand.
I, I think one of the key things I'm looking for is cultural fit.
Can my company work with this partner? Yeah. Do we have compatibility in terms of cultures? Because you may find, yeah, you find the somebody who's really, really good at it. Maybe it's someone out of California or something like this, this. But their culture in that space could be so alien to your company that you're going to Build that divide and that change management is going to be almost impossible to actually have that talent coming from the partner and helping you develop and helping you as a company. Yeah. If you've got a constant friction then you're going to struggle. So that's kind of one of the key things I think.
[00:50:43] Speaker A: Martin, how do you, you cross the chasm with what Joe introduced, You know, the not invented here syndrome.
The, you know, we're, we live in country X and you're bringing a partner from country Y.
When I think about cultural fit, these two things, you know, if I, if those, these two things are always going to come up with innovation teams in a co creation environment and I'm just wondering how like if I just said cultural fit and these two things showed up. Right. Not invented here or working with a, with a team outside your country. I would never be able to co create because every team is afraid of that and doesn't want to get involved with that.
[00:51:28] Speaker E: Yeah, but I think you've got to look at the bigger picture. You have to use, yeah. Basic principles of change management. You have to help your team to understand that it's yeah. Survive or die.
And that unless we actually make some of these things work we're never going to move forward fast enough to keep up with the competition. So I, I think the, the basic principle to change management is helping your team to understand that we have to make this work and try and get away from the kind of built in resistance. I'm not invented here.
And some of that is picking the right partner with the, they're a right approach that's compatible with your own. Some of that is clarity and communication and clear information.
[00:52:17] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:52:17] Speaker E: Most resistance to change is born out of lack of understanding, lack of information, lack of knowledge and fear of the unknown. And if you've got a vacuum, people will always go to the worst case scenario. So if you don't tell them you're bringing this company in to help move the company forward, people are going to think you're bringing that company in to take their jobs away.
[00:52:41] Speaker A: I, I think one of the things I'm, I always look for in partners is ones that go pretty wide across their organization and being able to prove their value to explain their value to partner on their value.
I mean it's not just the people who are signing the contract or the leaders of the efforts. You know, somewhere in here I'm going to have an agile team.
It's going to include members from my, my employees. It's going to include members from my, you know, co creating partner or partners.
They're going to be, you know, a multidisciplinary team. So they might have markers, they might have technologists on it, they'll have user experience folks on it, they're going to have AI specialists on it. And you know, being able to have that conversation of where you're contributing is, it's a day in, day out exercise. I don't know how you guys feel about that. We have seven minutes left. Today we're talking about how partnerships accelerate innovation and talent readiness.
I want to go around the room. We've got seven minutes and I want everybody to just be able to lay out one bit of expertise that we haven't covered on how to make these partnerships work, how to ensure that when you find a good partner, you can accelerate innovation, how to find the right good partner, or how to make sure that the talent is actually collaborating well together.
Let's go to. We haven't heard from Joe in a while.
Joe, your one bit of advice for everybody.
[00:54:15] Speaker F: Well, I'm going to say as you're co creating, be careful that you don't spread yourself too thin.
You don't want to be dealing with a dozen co creators because you would, you would lose focus. You just won't be able to sustain the effort and deliver the value that you're expecting.
So I would say just don't spread yourself too thin.
[00:54:39] Speaker A: Thank you. Let's go to Derek.
[00:54:43] Speaker G: Co creation and resilience both begin with the mindset. And it's really important that the leadership understands that having a positive mindset and focus on the outcomes earlier on makes it easier to set realistic expectations to move forward.
[00:54:57] Speaker A: So a clear definition of targeted outcomes.
Well, let's go to Martin.
[00:55:09] Speaker E: Be aware of what has failed in this field before.
[00:55:13] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:55:14] Speaker E: Try and avoid the pitfalls that other people have already gone down.
[00:55:20] Speaker A: Okay, Joanne's raising her hand. Go ahead, Joanne.
[00:55:25] Speaker D: Understand who your partner's partners are.
[00:55:30] Speaker A: And.
[00:55:31] Speaker D: Be very careful that your partner's partners are not so deeply embedded in your partner's organization that you can have IP leakage or that they're not being influenced by other parties to extend the partnership to other areas without necessarily wanting to go down that path. We get so involved in the partner relationships that we go, yeah, that really is a good idea. Wait a second. Later on, that really wasn't a good idea.
So understand who your partner's partners are and understand how you can leverage your partners to get what you need and then go back to them as opposed to scope creep, which happens more and.
[00:56:19] Speaker A: More often these days understanding potential of conflicts of interest. I think it's a really good area to make sure that you're completely compliance teams are engaged and looking for such things. Heather, your your suggestion just I have.
[00:56:37] Speaker H: A suggestion but to comment on what Joanne said there's a legal implication also you have to know where your teams are and are they in locations that are acceptable in in their respective countries and what they're doing where they're getting their resources from. Make sure that that is not nefarious.
My comment is do what you do best and outsource buy co create the rest.
[00:57:03] Speaker A: Thank you for joining Heather and let's.
[00:57:05] Speaker C: See who Jay yeah, my two cents would be I think that traditional teams focus on owning deliverables co creation demands on sharing outcomes and what that basically means is redefining success. Not my idea or my product but our impact.
[00:57:28] Speaker A: So again focusing on what the outcomes on and getting alignment around that. Jay thank you for joining us this week. Juanita yeah, I have too.
[00:57:40] Speaker B: I would say it's been it's been said before but bears repeating. I think having your again clear requirements or clear scope on what you're going to work on with your partners is so important.
So that one but also I think I didn't hear it.
You should definitely ask for proof points right?
Where has your partner found success? Where have they done this before?
Always want to ask that and discover that before you go into any contractor business. Like have they done what you're asking before? So what are those proof points or references they can bring to you?
[00:58:22] Speaker A: Awesome. We have left almost everyone here who's been here listening to our best practices around the co creation mandate, how partnerships accelerate innovation and talent readiness.
I will share one we haven't touched on. I really like getting down into the weeds and making sure roles and responsibilities between people working together are clearly outlined.
What I call a product owner or a product manager or delivery leader or a scrum master or a data scientist in my organization may not have the same definitions or the same working processes or the same responsibilities when working with a partner. So just remember when you're working with partners, bring together your playbook, your way of working, your agile, your DevOps and making sure there's a clear alignment about what your process is going forward.
It is the number one thing that we do at Star CIO is working with companies around their ways of working and creating standards with them. If you'd like more information around Star CIO do reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'd love to tell you more about that and our digital trailblazer community. There is a link. Thank you Adam for prompting me for it. There is a link in the comments for that. Folks, we'll be back here next week and talking about AI agents at work the IT and HR alliance to drive adoption and value. On the 7th we'll be talking about reducing stress and the digital trailblazers role in reducing stress across the organization, teams and themselves. On the 14th we'll be doing AI for social good. The 21st we'll be talking about AI natives and then on the 28th we'll be taking Friday off for the Thanksgiving holiday. Folks, everybody have a great weekend. Thank you for joining this week. Want to thank Juanita and Jay for being our special guests of course to Joanne, Joe, Martin, Heather, Derek for joining us. Did I miss somebody? I missed somebody. I hope I didn't. Thank you every Joanne thank you for everybody for joining us. And we'll be back here next week same time to talk about AI agents at.
