 and welcome back to the Creative Life from the American Creativity Association on St. Tech, Hawaii. I'm your host, Phyllis Glees, and our co-host today is Darlene Boyd. Today on the show, we will be discussing how to design innovative organizations. With our guest, Neal Gooderson. Neal is an entrepreneurial scientist who has spent over 35 years innovating how farming is done by creating new technologies in the agricultural industry. In the last seven of those years, he has worked with Cortiva Inc, and there he has focused particularly on designing the way an organization is structured to optimize innovation. We might find that very valuable in all of our own organizations and ways to apply. You can send questions also by email to questionsatlinktechhawaii.com. So, welcome, Neal, and let me start with you. I'm great to be here today. Right. What got you into being an entrepreneur in the farming industry? Well, Phyllis, you know, it's a long journey, and I started out in the early 80s coming out of grad school. I was trained as a biochemist, molecular biologist, and it was the early days of biotech. I was pretty enamored of that as a tool. And, you know, when I thought about being an academic, I thought, you know, I want to do something much more applied and directly impactful. And with biotech starting, I went to one of the early ag startups looking to use biotechnology to actually shift a bit, let's say, from chemistry to biological solutions for farmers. And so, that was one of the earliest things I got involved with. But as I worked in that startup, it was in Vansionetic Sciences, I realized, you know, the opportunity to make an impact, you know, you really needed to look at both technology and business. I worked at that company for about 18 years, ended up leading the R&D organization, and then went to a new startup that was focused on, again, another generation of biotech in ag, improving yields, improving stress tolerance, new tools for farmers. Was there for several years and actually was the CEO for seven years of the company called Mendel Biotech. And then I was attracted to and got a position at Pioneer Hybrid, one of the world's leading breeding organizations and seed companies, went there to lead a biotech group, lead the R&D organization, then to merge it with Corteva Hap. And in that time, as we formed one of the, you know, top two or three ag organizations around the world serving farmers very closely, I began to think a lot more about, as you noted, how do we structure an organization, a larger organization, a complex organization, in a way to optimize our ability to deliver value today for the farmers in our standard business, let's say, but also work towards the future needs of those farmers and the future technologies that could help us deliver on those needs. So pretty early on started to see the importance of doing both the kind of innovation idea of the small company and large companies developing cycles of products. So you would say that if we were going to say on today's show, what's the problem that you face, then how did you solve it? You actually looked at the organizational operations in the business that needed to get, they needed to get new products coming down the pipeline, they needed to get ready for their customers today, that might be showing up down the line. And part of this solving this problem, I'm going to throw out for the audience, the term ambidextrous innovation. And that's going to be something you're going to help us learn about today, and how does that help solve this problem of organizing a business for success and innovation? What is it? Yeah, so let's talk about ambidextrous innovation and how we came to this. There are two, let's just say, class kinds of innovation you might think of for companies. One of those is this sort of routine innovation that we do might call it sustaining innovation. The company that's been around a while will have a business model, how they serve their customers, and a set of products. And every year they're making better products. And they know, because the customers tell them, let's make this product a little better in this way. So that sort of delivery based innovation is more the province, let's say, of incumbents in a particular industry, with an existing business model that's working very well. And at the same time, or the alternative really is about, let's say, transformational innovation. And I grew up in that world as startups, right? That's what entrepreneurs do, they look at what's happening in the world, try to change it, try to transform it, bring new technology and new business models into the marketplace. Now an incumbent company, a big company, you know, should be doing work both for today, today's customers with today's products, but also anticipating the needs of their customers in the future. The customers are changing, the farmer is changing very much today, compared to what it was five or 10 years ago, demographics is going to change in the next 10 or 15 years. Who is the customer? How do we serve them? How do we anticipate their needs? And so therefore, how do we do both? Today's customers with today's products, tomorrow's customers with tomorrow's products, holding those two ideas, two ways of working, intention, that's the heart of ambidextrous innovation. And to make it work, you need the idea, but you then need to think about how do we structure the organization internally to be able to do both well? And I believe absolutely, you know, with all the conviction that the best companies in the world, the longest term lasting companies in the world will be those who can be ambidextrous innovators doing both today's innovation, sustaining and transformational innovation. Are these the same people or do you have side by side teams doing that? Yeah, it's interesting. You know, we, I think there are some people who like different kinds of, you know, sustaining innovation, right? Very clear path, very kind of really linear path. Maybe they're not so enamored of the uncertainty of a more transformational innovation. And there are some people who like, you know, the more startup type people, startup companies, startup ideas. And so you definitely can find in a larger organization, people who are attracted to each of those kinds of innovation. They work in parallel, right? But they also share ideas. And the technologies that might be developed in the core innovation group might be leveraged over to sustaining the transformational innovation. It's also a good journey for people, right, to learn different ways of innovating. One of the really important things is that you build independent and it's because what often happens at a big company is you get a set of projects. And what you find is that any individual project has a high probability of success. It's a small improvement. It's going to generate value for the business. And instead of funding a project like that, you find a higher risk or transformational project. On the surface of it, that project is worth less, right? And so you'll always favor the sustaining innovations. That's what big companies do. That's the innovator's dilemma, as Clayton Christensen called it, in essence. But if you have a portfolio of innovations that are high risk, some of those probably won't get in the market. Others will be kind of neutral in the market, but some will be huge winners in the market. And so it's the portfolio of sustaining innovation and a portfolio of transformational innovation that really is at the heart of doing ambidextrous innovation. When you talk about these teams, might you be able to clarify how do you determine the membership of the teams? Do individuals just emerge as being appropriate for the present or in the future? Or can you tell just a little bit more about the membership? Yeah, that's a great question. And as I said earlier, some people have more of an affinity for one type or another. The level of uncertainty, the level of risk is different in the transformational side sometimes. But part of it is identifying the right people within the organization who have that aptitude and then training them. The way that we had done that at Corteva was to treat the portfolio of transformational innovation more or less the way a venture firm would treat its portfolio of companies, different ways of thinking about the marketplace. You don't necessarily evaluate a project's value based on a single, net present value of the future sales of a product. For venture, you look at what's the total market opportunity? What's the technology risk? What's the time to get to the market? So we train people to think differently. We train people to also to partner very closely. Oftentimes, standing innovations are mostly about technology. And so scientists are probably the prime drivers. But this transformational innovation is much more a partnership like a startup would be between business thinkers, commercial thinkers, marketers, and technology innovators. And so we also try to find people who really want to work together and scientists who learn more about the business and vice versa. So Neely, you have some show and tell for us today. We're starting, I think you did some of your most innovative work at Corteva. And do you have something to show us that give us a sense of what this firm looks like? It's getting this ambidextrous, innovative organizational leadership. Absolutely. Well, let me let me let's start with one video. There's a second that maybe helps tell the story too. But the first one, which we call transforming the farm, is about the disruptive innovation unit itself. And it was about some of the disruptive opportunities and ideas, but also about the people and the way they work. So let's have a look at that one. This little black box can turn our growers into scientists, bringing the science right into their field. We need to learn and understand as much about bees as possible. Farmers can have access to all the satellite data at a resolution, which is second to none. For many people, change is uncomfortable. It's a scary word. But for these people, it's what they live for. Some of the most innovative ideas in the world today are happening right here in agriculture. Corteva has created a team of people dedicated to changing agriculture. And we want to not just experience it, we want to lead that disruption, disrupt ourselves, disrupt the industry. We have some brilliant scientists and technologists working on problems that farmers don't even know they have yet. We're designing the future of agriculture by deploying the latest technologies to the farm. You learn fast, you move fast. The really innovative stuff we're doing includes bee-friendly insecticides and robotics and artificial intelligence and alternative proteins and new satellite imaging tools. The accuracy and the speed and the resolution at which we get information from either satellites or a drone. It makes decision making extremely powerful. Fingerprinting our plants gives us the ability to understand what's hitched along for the ride. And often that's a disease. It saves money. It saves time. It saves resources. It's fun. You get a chance to innovate. You get a chance to create new things that have some sort of benefit down the road for either growers or consumers. It's a fun group of scientists to work with. We can win for farmers, we can win for the consumer, we can win for the planet. Agriculture can be much better than it is today and we're committed to delivering that. We took us into the future there and from all places, from farming, the oldest industry in the world. Fingerprinting a plant. The lady walked in at the beginning with a black box. Do you send people that you train these scientists who are thinking innovatively? Do you outsource them to the farm? Are they doing that? Is that how this happens? Do you disrupt existing farms by planting your disruptors across the industry? You send them out into the field like bees? Well, fellas, it's a good point that if you're going to understand farming, you better get out into a farm and you better talk to farmers and understand what's the pain point on the farm, what are the challenges that they really face that we're actually solving real problems that farmers care about. Some people work in the lab on lab stage of problems, but we did have this philosophy of co-developing innovation with farmers, testing ideas directly on farmers' fields and engaging them early on in a dialogue about not so much what they think it's like the iPhone. No one thought about the iPhone. You couldn't say to someone, what do you need in the future? But you could understand what their problems were, and that's why Apple kept with an iPhone. It was a way of solving those problems. So, yes, people go out on the field, work in the labs, and agriculture farming is sometimes one of the least sexy industries around. I think one of the reasons is that a farm looks a lot the same as it did 50 years ago, right? They're still plants in the field and they're growing and unlike phones go from old and computers from old to very modern looking, sort of sexier to do that. But as you can tell from that video, hopefully everyone can, the level of information and technology being deployed on the farm to make farmers' lives better is extraordinary. And to do that does require still this kind of innovation. And, you know, people who are doing more of this transformational innovation are learning from the experiences of the commercial market at Bay of Corteva. They're learning from the experiences of their colleagues in the sustaining innovations because they'll see some problems, right? That can be picked up by those folks working in the disruptive unit. And you've got a feel for those people, right? These are just some of our, you know, creative scientists who have a little passion for a different kind of challenge. And it's fun as well as important for the farmers around the world. You know, if I may, maybe this is a good time to share the second video because I think it gives you another flavor on, as you'll see in this video, the importance of listening not just to the farmer, but to the consumer. And that's part of the theme of this disruptive way of thinking about farming, but also showcases a few more of the kinds of ideas and new concepts. So if we can go ahead and do the table of the farm video, that would be great. We all know who runs a farm. The one who calls the shots, decides what to grow, and how to grow it. But it's not just farmers. It's Sophia. That's right. Sophia, a new kind of consumer who's informed and empowered and knows exactly what she wants to eat and how she wants it grown. In addition to everything else that can make farming so unpredictable, weather, pests, volatile markets, and trade disruptions, farmers must now respond to changing consumer demands. The supply chain is flipping and consumers like Sophia aren't at the end of it. They're at the beginning. We call it table to farm agriculture. It's the future of farming and it's what we're working on right now. It starts with our seeds, bred to be as resilient and productive as the people who grow them. And new targeted breeding technologies like CRISPR that promise to help farmers adapt to demanding consumers and equally demanding conditions. With the right tools, farmers can do more than react to change. They can anticipate it. We're pioneering virtual farming to help farmers prototype new ways of growing before they even plant a seed. When we overlay different kinds of data, we're helping farmers make smarter, faster decisions across the farm. Environmental and historical data to know which seeds to plant where and when. Drone and satellite imagery to pinpoint where crop protection is needed. Weather data and artificial intelligence to generate higher yields with a lower environmental impact. It's the dawn of a new agricultural revolution driven by consumers and built on sustainability. At Corteva AgroScience, we're developing integrated whole farm solutions that are reinventing the world's oldest industry as one of the most modern. With Table to Farm agriculture, farmers, Sophia and our planet all win and we all keep growing. Okay, I think a keyword for me is I watched the video was anticipate and I think we may go through a process of creative problem solving. Success often can be measured upon the anticipation of what those problems are. Talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah, no, I think that's that's vital and you know what I think the commercial organizations of many companies often do is understand what the problems people have and what features they want to see improved in their current product. The bigger challenge is to think about the nature of the problems that people face and sometimes I know in some companies they hire sociologists to go out and sit with their customers right and understand what the true problems are. So yeah and farming is a long horizon business. It takes a long time to develop the new products for farmers so you want to look out 15, 20 years. What's then what are the needs going to be? Let's anticipate as I said earlier the demographic changes in farmers. I mean, give you an example you know in North America today the average farmer is probably 55 to 60 years old, still predominantly male. We would expect in 15, 20 years the farmer to be much more gender diverse, younger and much more tech savvy. So think about how we're all used to interacting with products and services on our computer you know getting ideas proposed to us by Amazon or others right based on our buying habits. I think the farmer the future is going to want to be served in some similar ways. That's how they're going to grow up in this world right being served differently than ever before. And so I think this does inform the kinds of innovations and and transformational business models that I think companies are exploring today. So anticipation is a really key word. A great call out Arlene. Thank you. Am I am I correct to assume that there still is a pattern of farming that's passed on from generation to generation? And I would suspect perhaps that there's a rigidity because of that knowing to change. Farming is definitely generational right and the best farmers really take care of their land protect their land you know their children maybe grow up in the farm go off come back. I think you see a bit more of that perhaps even today. But more importantly you know farming is a pretty conservative you know operation conservative business why because if you make one mistake try some new technology in a backfires. You're a small company owner as a farmer your entire company can crater if you make a bad choice. That was behind my question that the pattern of creativity that the new generations coming in perhaps they were more open. Yes I think I think there are problems appropriately. Yep growing generation of new tech savvy farmers who are open to trying things. I mean to some extent these are on computers right you you can predict for a farmer what what their farm might look like and how it might perform on a computer and share that with a grower. You can offer them new services right drones that spray chemicals and measure things on their farm. And one of the key drivers I think also of the next generation is a passionate interest in sustainability in improving the environment in which we farm and which we live. And so there's a lot of receptivity to farmers farming carbon sequestering carbon to mitigate and climate change. So those are some of the features that lead to the need for ambidextrous innovation because there is so much change going on on the farm. Well thank you let's take ourselves down the street now and I understand now that you've left for Teva you're working on an international board that is catalyzing these ideas into other industries and then maybe even into developing countries in other ways. So you want to talk a little bit about that Neil. Sure I'd be delighted to do that. You know these ideas of ambidextrous innovation they're I think they're very broad and very important for many large organizations that have current businesses and future businesses customers are changing. And so and you can see that you know some of the companies that we know best in you know whether it's a Google or an Apple or a Netflix and Amazon these are companies that have done a great job of driving continual improvement in some of their business segments and then also innovating to create new and different business segments. When I went off and when I retired at the end of last year I had actually just joined the board of the CGIAR. It's an international organization whose purpose is to serve mobile holder farmers and low-income companies to help them become more profitable organization. The CG for short is going through its own transformation as an organization. It draws on a number of centers around the world now getting organized as one integrated innovation organization. And will you realize these same principles apply here as well even though this is a non-for-profit essentially serving small holder farmers on behalf of governments around the world and other funders. There are some things that the group does that's early routine the next generation of foreign products or millet products you know for the farmer or you know the Kato's whatever it might be but also working on new ways of serving farmers right. So there's a need for both system transformation at an organization like the CGIAR serving small holder farmers around the world and there's a need for more routine sustaining innovation. And so I'm you know working with at the board level and with some of the management to think about okay what's the right approach to designing innovation in the CGIAR. Leveraging those same principles knowing the answers may be a little different but I think the principles of the need for different portfolios different kinds of people they're still very much germane and I think that sort of approach to innovation will make the CGIAR even more successful and effective in improving the livelihoods of small holder farmers than it's ever been. It's a very exciting journey for me to bring that. If you would I I wonder how someone prepares to position themselves to be on a farm as a data scientist or as an AI you know our our kids are going to school and they're learning all the computer science degrees and ways to use it and they're thinking about high tech. How do you cultivate this generation that are going to have to become high tech savvy and then take it into the farm that's not what they're thinking. How are you grooming these innovators? Yeah you know it's um I think farming and agriculture and food it's kind of a calling so some people are just drawn to it. Many people come off the farm originally and your point about Dave is that an important one right the farming world is a wash and data right we can now have satellites that can look down and resolution of a few meters and see what's happening on a farm. We have drones that can get resolution down to the you know centimeter level and look at each plant in the field and so I think um the the challenge of using information in really sophisticated way on the farm is attracting people who maybe wouldn't have been attracted 20 years ago to the farm and to farming as a practice and to innovating for farmers. I think we can offer farmers simplicity, convenience, the ability to predict what's going to happen on their farm and make much much better decisions and and do it in a more sustainable way in a combination of things is really attractive to actually a growing group of younger scientists and innovators and we see it in the small companies that are growing up in agriculture as well as in the larger companies. Does a does a farm need a middleman like Carteva or your nonprofit to know how to attract and manage these I mean I wouldn't imagine that a generation third generation farmer would even know how to talk to and manage and and actually feed the needs of this kind of worker. Are they full-time or are they contract? How do you bring this into your culture? Yeah I mean I think you know I think farmers are more and more sophisticated actually so um that's happening in real time. People are learning and becoming more savvy with technology but um I think it is important that because farming is so complex complicated an individual individual decision that looks appealing right you want to become more sustainable but you don't want to lose money while you do a new practice so I think you know AI data tools computational tools is a really important that companies can invest in those on behalf of a large number of customer or farmers and then bring some of the best of that technology to farmers um and farmers are engaging you know regularly now right with small company innovators large company innovators. I think we talked about this as the co-design it's a really powerful um an important opportunity. Oh thank you and darling I know you have questions and I see us down on the last minute of our time. My thanks for the experience I certainly will look at my salad differently this evening and I think we've learned a lot. I did a great session quite a bit. So I think we'll leave it there. The audience you've been watching the creative life on Think Tech Hawaii today darling Boyd and I have been discussing ambidextrous innovation for the global food system and how to enable farmers around the world to be more sustainable and productive and we've been learning all this from our guest Neil Gutherson. Thanks for participating Neil and Darlene and thanks to all you viewers for tuning in. I'm Phyllis Bleece and we'll be back in two weeks with another edition of The Creative Life. Aloha.