 So I'm going to start with Katie. Katie Ahern is this panel's moderator, and she is the director of the RW Law Business Startup Clinic. Katie leads the school's Business Startup Clinic, which serves nonprofit and small business clients. Students in the clinic learn substantive business lawyering skills, work directly with clients, and interact with the Rhode Island nonprofit and small business community. Professor Ahern was previously an associate at Hinckley Allen and Snyder, where her legal practice focused in all areas of federal, state, and local tax matters affecting businesses, individuals, governmental entities, and tax-exempt organizations. Katie also teaches business law-related classes at the University of Rhode Island. The next person not sitting next to Katie is Lisa. Lisa Rayola is the president and founder of Hope in Maine. Rhode Island's first food business incubator established to assist local entrepreneurs to jumpstart early-stage food companies by providing low-cost, low-risk access to shared use commercial kitchens and other industry-specific technical resources. Hope in Maine helps to grow the local food economy. By creating a community, please shut off your cell phones of support for food entrepreneurs and cultivating an environment where emerging culinary startups can test, create, scale, and thrive. Approaching its one-year anniversary, Hope in Maine has launched 50 businesses. In addition, Lisa is vice president for institutional advancement at Roger Williams University, where she is responsible for fundraising for both the university and the law school, including major gifts, corporate and foundation relations, annual giving, and alumni-parent relations. Next, we have Jessica David. Jessica is the senior vice president of strategy and community investments for the Rhode Island Foundation. The Rhode Island Foundation is one of the nation's oldest and largest community foundations, Rhode Island's only community foundation, and the largest funder of Rhode Island's nonprofit sector. Jessica is responsible for the Rhode Island Foundation's strategy communications, evaluation, and learning grant programs, and economic security sector. Among projects she has led are the Rhode Island Innovation Fellowships, a program that develops, tests, and implements innovative ideas to improve any area of life in Rhode Island, make it happen R.I., an effort initiated in 2012 to improve the state's economy, and the civic leadership fund that enables the foundation to seize opportunities, meet emerging challenges, and continue its work as a connector and a convener. Finally, we have Phil Rosenthal. Phil Rosenthal is the president and co-founder of Fast Case. Under Phil's leadership, Fast Case has grown to one of the largest legal publishers in the world, serving two-thirds of the lawyers in the United States. Fast Case also is the number one provider of online legal research benefits to bar associations around the country and has the most downloaded legal app according to the ABA. Phil combines his backgrounds in technology and law to bring lawyers and law librarians online legal research tools that are smarter and more intuitive. Before founding Fast Case, Phil was an associate at Covington and Burling in Washington, DC. His diverse legal practice encompass nuclear patent, telecommunications, environmental, and corporate law. Katie, take it away. Anyone else really impressed by his phrase nuclear patent? Thank you again for inviting me to be a part of this. I think this is a really insightful and innovative way to dig into and brainstorm changes in your own industry, so I'm excited to be a part of it. For the first question, according to the book Collective Genius, The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, quote, innovation is the creation of something both novel and useful. It can be larger, small, incremental, or breakthrough. It can be a new product, new service, new process, a new business model, a new way of organizing, or a new film made in a new way. So to start us off, would each of you briefly describe what your organization does and then also share with us if there's anything that you would like to add to this definition of innovation? Who wouldn't mind starting with Jessica, and then we'll actually do. We'll do at least the last since she has a special treat to share with us. Good morning. It's really exciting to be here, so thank you for inviting me. I think that's as good a definition as I've heard. We actually at the foundation, we have a program that has innovation in its name, so we've spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what the definition of innovation is. And my summary of that is that everyone has a different one, and it's sort of like, you know it when you see it. And so I try not to spend too much time defining it beyond that. I think for the foundations, that's just sort of an interesting entity, I feel like, to be up here. We are turning 100 years old next year in 2016, and so we are a fairly traditional organization that's been around a long time, that for most of its life did things fairly traditionally. And I would argue fairly conservatively, but don't tell anyone that. And really, I would say over the past 10 years or so, five to 10 years, has sort of reinvented itself. And largely in response to community needs and demands from people like Lisa, who are really doing the on the ground workout in the community, and also our donors, who for a very long time, we have many generous donors who were very content to turn their money over to the foundation and didn't really expect beyond that much in the way of evaluation, of results, of communication, of ongoing tweaking and adapting of programs. And we've really seen that shift over the last decade or so as there's generational shifts in philanthropy. So between, I would say, the community and our donor base, we've really been, I think, forced to change and to adapt. So our core areas of business are raising money, working with philanthropists, making grants and investments in the community, and doing a lot of leadership work in all of the spaces in between and including the public sector. And I think all of those areas have been influenced by this concept of innovation or transformation and has forced us to rethink how we're doing things. So I think we are sort of an interesting organization in that we're kind of on the, we're straddling the line a little bit, that we still do things in some traditional ways, and we are doing things in new and what feel like fairly innovative ways for the philanthropic community. So I think I'll stop there for that question. And the donor-driven innovation has really been an interesting thing to watch. So watching what is, I guess you consider, part of your client or stakeholder base, drive the innovation as a really neat viewpoint. Unfortunately, lawyers are very familiar with, I know it when I see it, definitions. So we're gonna skip over to Phil and then go to Lisa. Good morning, everybody, and thank you so much for inviting me. Wish I could stay the whole day with you, but we had through lunch. First, I just have to ask, was there a toxic spill on that side of the room? Is there? I don't know why everyone is over here. Also, as you know, I'm a lawyer and finally I get to do something in a courtroom. So thank you, I never really did that. So fast case I think a lot of you have heard of us. We try to bring big data analytics to legal research to make legal research beautiful, smarter, faster, easier, that's half of our mission. The other half is to democratize the law. And those two of course are in a lot of tension and have created, have necessitated some innovations because how do you make it affordable and democratize it and yet have the funds to do interesting things? And so certainly working with the bar market and I have to say one where we started actually was with the social law library and that was what I think one of our biggest things was to move into it doesn't have to be a bar and to start doing that kind of member benefit and it really all started with Robert in the back. So always great to see him there. And so in terms of the definition, I felt a lot about does it really have to be novel? May in some strict linguistic sense and innovation almost by definition has to be but I don't know. So first perfect novelty is so rarely happens. I think in my physics days when there'd be even when there'd be some big breakthrough, two or three groups might do it at the same time. It was just the time for that to happen. Maybe it could be done before but it's in a slightly new circumstance, the some aspect that's different. Is the idea of affordable legal research truly novel? I don't know or maybe the interface is a little different or a little cleaner. Sometimes I think even being second, we weren't strictly the first to enter the bar market but I think applying it to our situation and the way we did it, maybe there was some novelty there. Discounts, that's not novel. One of the things we did in certain circumstances was the 80% discount. Is that novel? I don't know, it's big, it's unusual. So I think applying a model that's out there, just moving it over, I think sometimes people get scared away from innovation because oh my gosh, am I, I can't be Steve Jobs. Well I can't be Steve Jobs either. No one is going to be that but there are these things that seem so little you can do. I see them using it over there, I'm gonna bring it over here. It makes a big difference. Is it novel enough? Is it innovation? I don't know, it makes a big difference. So let's do it. So innovation is relative then to your industry, is it good to play? It can be local. It might not be globally innovative but it might be innovative in your little pond and that makes it innovative, so. That's a good point. Okay, so I'm gonna go right to your video then if that's okay. Sure, Katie, thanks. That's cause my elevator speech takes an 80 story building. We have an incredible range of companies. We have people making pickles and tomato jam and cheesecakes and coconut butter and popcorn. I've been continually pressed with the range of businesses that we've been able to attract to Hope and Main. And I'd like to say that when you see one food business you've seen one because they all have a different set of needs. And the fun part of the project is problem solving for all these different kinds of businesses from the kind of equipment that they need to the kind of packaging that they need. And it's been a wonderful learning experience I think not only for the businesses but also for Hope and Main with each new business we're learning how we can be a better assistance to people. And the big picture Hope and Main is changing is changing people's relationship to food. My own passion was to was to be was to get people to conversation about their food and what they're putting in their bodies. I think that we've lost touch with the provenance of the people with the provenance of our food and it's something that we advocated 100 years ago when this building was built the idea of local food would have been an anomaly you wouldn't have understood the term because all of our food was local and it was very much the basis of our economy. We had a mercantile economy 100 years ago and now our food can come from anywhere and many of us don't know where it comes from so at its core Hope and Main is trying to change the conversation by and by locating in a school it's the perfect metaphor for education. I want to educate people about the way in which food relates to the quality of your life so that we can invite the community into this conversation you don't get an education by reading food labels while you're walking through the supermarket you understand food when you can interact with it and be part of a community that wants to be in that conversation and take back the local food system. Do not work at Hope and Main I work here at Roger Williams and Bun-Rays that I think is sort of undervalued or under-discuss is the ability for philanthropy to stimulate innovation because innovation can come from a place of desperation or inspiration and in some ways without philanthropy you find yourself coming from that place of desperation to have a facility that gives you these wide margins of failure actually is a real luxury for startups and Katie's startup clinic and the students there have helped many, many of these companies to form corporations to think about intellectual property to help them to jumpstart their businesses and none of that would have happened without philanthropy so it's just such a wonderful tie-in. We do realize that was a mean video to show before lunch but this is an incredible organization so I assure you it is worth it they find really interesting ways to partner with others in the community my clinic is one example to bring more to their audience. Alright so moving on to our next question in what ways does your organization promote innovation, entrepreneurship or creativity in the workplace? Anyone who wants to start? You know I think in some ways the biggest thing we do is try to get out of the way and what I mean by that is I think if you have smart, passionate people they're gonna have creativity and I think as a society and a lot of organizations we do everything we can to make sure it doesn't happen and you know I just have a few examples and not just from us the classic thing when they asked Henry Ford about the automobile and he said look to put it in modern parlance if I first had to do a focus group people would have said they want a better horse and you're not gonna get the wild departures and if you say well fantastic idea and let's go through a two year process to see if it actually you'll never get there so I think that's a part of it I think part of it just you want top down to have everyone thinking of the interesting issues that are according to whatever your mission is it could be as simple as when interesting folks come through DC and let us know when you're in DC and we try to have a lunch with our team Tom Bruce is passing by come by for lunch and just so people can hear about it even if it's quote unquote not relevant it's always relevant and it'll stimulate something so we just try to do things like that you know and ultimately it's an ethos of risk taking which is hard at law firms I realize I mean I remember and we go well beyond the bar world but one of the first partners we had there was the Virginia State Bar and when we were looking at that another company threatened to sue the bar and us in antitrust because doing a member benefit was clearly a violation of antitrust no one really knew how but you know and so what do you do when you get threatened with major antitrust litigation you know we looked at it and then decided to ignore it and you gotta do that and so we try to have that kind of ethos which is again especially hard for law firms but I think anyway so it's a combination of those things so I'll just give a specific example of something that I found surprising which is which because Hope and Main as you can see is a shared use space so that's what makes it affordable for the makers to be there there's a number of companies working in kitchens together at any one time and because of the food safety regulations you have to have people doing similar processes so there's a baking kitchen and a processing kitchen and so forth so you might have several bakers in the baking kitchen at one time and you might have several for example salsa makers in the processing kitchen and I think we're up to maybe four or five salsa makers of people who make sauces part of a whole product line and you know at first I was thinking how is that going to work because they would potentially see themselves as in competition with each other but what we found is that peer collaboration is an incredible source of innovation and they don't fear that the other person is going to imitate them or steal their recipe in fact they've learned from the students at the startup clinic that you know if you have a trade secret you're able to protect that in various ways but what's happened is that they're able to riff off of each other and just without even creating a lot of without over-engineering it we've seen tremendous innovation that comes from peers that collaborate and each of them has made each other's product better so I'm going to answer the question that you asked and then I'm going to answer the question and I want to answer which I think is fair so within my organization I would say we don't really do the best job of really fostering innovation and so that's a takeaway that I'm going home with but I think I would say two things that we do do that I think are smart are one to Phil's point about it's hard in certain industries and in certain organizations I think that's true in certain pieces of our work failure really isn't an option there are some donors you can't screw up that relationship there are there's certain funding that is really about sustaining and making sure that programs are happening it's not about taking risks and trying new things so to jeopardize that would be to jeopardize really important services so there's a certain piece of our work that I think is more about execution and improvement that it is about innovation and I think it's really important that you think about those things differently and that you ask yourself that because I think we tend to put innovation sometimes on a pedestal like it should be everywhere and it's this it's above all and it's important and it's critical but it has to be factored into everything else I would say that something we have gotten good at within my organization is figuring out what the questions are the really important questions that we have so we gradually after banging my head against the wall for a while realize wait we keep circling around the same issues and we're not resolving them and I found there was incredible power of just articulating what those questions and those issues are not so much that they were going to be solved immediately by our board, by our staff, by the community but even just sort of holding them out there I think allowed a certain level of creative discussion suggestions small experiments that wouldn't have happened if we just kept kind of like mucking around and not really knowing what we were mucking around with so I would say we've done that well and then the last thing is I think I think probably the best thing we've done is we've allowed it to happen when it's happened so the thing I really give our CEO the most credit for is there have been some ideas that we've had where in hindsight they're kind of crazy and silly and he's let us run with them and some of them have worked out really well some of them have not and we try to minimize the collateral damage that happens but I think that that's been really important but the question that I would prefer to answer is or I would have more fun answering is what we do in the community to foster innovation and there I think there's really two roles that we play, one obviously is funding so certainly we can and in all areas of our work I think there is a very strong innovation thread and there actually has been since the foundation's beginning so we have funded start up nonprofit organizations that now are extremely well established we have funded start up nonprofits that do not exist we have funded new programs that have taken off and that have failed and so I think that's an important piece of what we do to allow space for that within the within the social sector and also within the public sector increasingly so a lot of the work that we're doing right now intersects with government and innovation in government is a whole and that would be a really interesting discussion or panelist to have because I've had a lot of conversations with folks who are new to government who are trying to make change in the public sector that I think is almost set up to withstand any kind of any kind of change and so we've been thinking a lot about how can we support and foster that and I've had some really good small little experiments I feel like but the big thing and the most important thing I think we do and Lisa already touched on it is just connecting people and putting smart people in the same room to talk about and it can be anything really I mean I have found it can be common challenges it can be new opportunities it can be venting sessions sometimes I mean it really is just putting sort of smart people and the I always get it wrong the whole is greater than some of the parts I really truly believe that and I think it depends on who you have in the room because there are certain people who just that's not the mindset they bring but there are others who I always say when you get them together like magic things happen and on another panel I actually use the word poof and I will not use that again because it's a legal term not my finest moment but I do really believe that and so I think that all of us can do that in different ways I think it also relates to the question making part that I talked about because if you've got a really strongly crafted problem and you ask people what they think about solving it you're going to get things out of that they may or may not be useful but you can iterate over time and you also I think people start to work together in new ways and use different muscles and so you know in my area of work and grant making the economic security area I have what I consider kind of like a brain trust I didn't recall you that before but at least it's part of it where just people that I really trust I respect their work every time I leave a conversation with them I come away with some new like moment that kind of shifts my thinking and I think that's probably the best feeling that we have at work so those would be my thoughts. That's a lot of helpful points in there I think one that I particularly like is the idea that you have to prioritize your innovative ideas and your innovative efforts with everything else that you have and how do you balance that at any given time and strangely I was listening to a podcast in the way here about how you ask your audience or your clients questions that get them to tell you what they want because they don't know what they want and that was their showcase example was the Ford quote that if he had asked people what they wanted they probably would have said a better horse or a faster horse they had no way to think about a car being the answer so if you ask people what they want you won't really get a valuable answer and I don't think I've ever heard that before and I've now heard it twice in several hours so that was a bit spooky. Combine the next two questions actually they go a little bit hand in hand and I think Jessica has started to answer the first one really well does innovation come from in your experience the top down the bottom up is it neither is it both and then there are a lot of writings about innovation that talk about the tension that's endemic to an innovative atmosphere so how do you encourage all your staff members to argue with each other's visions and to disagree with each other without encouraging chaos or discontent at the same time so how do you tackle that and then how is that managed in your organization and what is your direction or combination of directions you want to start I think got part of an answer from Jessica so we'll start with Phil and work our way down Jessica had anything to add top down I think all the above you know there's and the studies is shown there's no substitute sometimes for someone who's just incredibly creative and very lucky my co-founder I'm sure you all know him he just is and there's certainly a lot less bureaucracy when the person at the top just has these great ideas and wants to run with them and so we you know so I think that's part of it but certainly you know when we had to redo our iPhone app in a certain way one of our people just ran with it and did it in the evening so I don't think we got to change it like this and so it doesn't have to be driven from the top our data operations the way we built them is because another one of our people who was CFO pretty close to the top just said we can make it better quality and more affordable if we build our own operations in China that's what she did so where does it come from it can come from anywhere again if you don't stop it and very importantly notwithstanding the Henry Ford comment I don't know why I was saying before law firm, law firm, law firm I know it's not it's mostly law school but anyway any law librarian you know legally research better than anyone and you tell us how to do it you tell us when we need a new feature and so I think a distinction on that board concept sometimes you can't expect anyone to just come up with well here's something no one's ever thought of before sometimes they do sometimes they don't but people come to you with a need they actually really have and that's fantastic and so that helps a lot and that leads to a lot of innovation so and so you know on the question about the second part of the creative tension and how do you have the arguing and without a discontent I actually think you never get discontent from the arguing you get this people are not happy when they can't say what they think when they don't have a voice if you let them have a voice and argue and everyone knows they're not going to win all the time but just to be heard I think makes a big difference so I think that actually helps and how do you know how do we do that we don't have a lot of hierarchy if you have an idea people are easily collaborating we have cubes if you have an idea it's not let's set up an appointment for two weeks from today and talk about it just walk over just call that kind of thing helps so much I think creating that culture and I think also what did it I think people see Ed and I disagree about things all the time we often used to say that if we both agree we know it's wrong and so we have that and some of the examples big and small should our apps be free and of course they are and it's been so important you know we argued about that I don't think I was on the right side of that originally I thought it might be too much cannibalizing you know the arguments you might think but that's okay we argue eventually say let's try it and another example you all probably know the kiss my app t-shirt right everyone loves the kiss my app t-shirt there are a couple people at the company who felt really it was a little too disrespectful to inappropriate we can't go there you know we talked about it we did it and I think that's how everyone else has reacted most people love it and a few people like that's okay and so you know you try so and a big last point I'll make on the second question is it's very hard in law schools or law firms so many places operate where if they're disagreements everyone has a veto right every professor has to be on board every partner has to be on board which guarantees you will do nothing interesting if everyone gets a veto you gotta you gotta have and I think the libraries can play a really big role in being a little outside of that culture and being where the experts on where the world is really going and you know we gotta go do this without getting everyone on board before you start pushing it and popularizing it I like that point because you know people get very confused about what consensus is and it doesn't mean that everybody agrees I find the best definition of consensus is when we all live with this and if you really can't live with this raise your hand when I'm working with groups it's one of the questions I like to ask because it's different than do we all agree because that's kind of a it's like a crazy question and also in an innovation environment where you're talking about you know teams of rivals you know the Lincoln model of a team of rivals you know a team of rivals can go in a lot of directions and a lot of government is set up to be you know a team of rivals and you know at best it's you know chaos versus gridlock but we don't seem to get anything you know better than that so how do you know how do organizations that embrace that philosophy get you know sort of get beyond gridlock and chaos and one of the things I think is very valuable is the convening role is what a Rhode Island foundation does or what your professional association does because sometimes organizations can't get past that and they need to bring ideas sort of outside to that you know to that neutral space where you don't have literally the organizational politics because I also think innovation is a beauty contest and voices aren't heard if they're not the people that are you know that you typically listen to in an organization and you know the best leaders are people that really do you know understand that there are you know that there are people in their organization they have to find a way to give a voice to because they're not necessarily people that speak up in meetings they're not the people that you know they hear from all the time they're not necessarily even ambitious people so I think there's a lot of you know need for organizational you know intelligence and most leaders if a political leader will telegraph that it's not okay to make mistakes it's not okay to disagree with me and all of a sudden they sort of shut down everything and they don't they only want to hear good news so I think there's a lot of things you know that come to play with organizational politics, organizational behavior where a professional association can be so helpful I think libraries are under incredible pressure to innovate I am on the board of the Rogers Free Library in Bristol I also have led the fundraising effort for the library learning commons on this campus not the library in the law school but the other one for the university and I've just never seen a place that is being asked to move at the speed of light in changing what you do and how you do it I don't know how you do it I'm so impressed with what libraries are based with these days and you have a tremendous need to innovate I second one all of it I'm on board so then I'll move on to how do you suggest balancing the patience that you need to support your employees and the innovators on the one hand with the urgency that you need to show results or be competitive in the market place on the other hand I feel like we've heard some ideas you know you talk about a veto system to make sure things get done Jessica's talking about balancing innovation priorities other priorities and Lisa's talked about creating or separating yourself into a neutral environment have that mechanism in place I feel like we've heard some ideas does anybody want to add more on that point I just want to say I think this is the best question ever this is the question and I personally am terrible at this I think it's really really hard I actually don't think anyone person can do this alone I think this is where your organizational culture and structure has to come up because I know I certainly lean on the urgent inpatient side and I need people around me who can sort of create a little bit more of a safe comfortable spot and I've certainly been in organizations where I've seen that dynamic play out to the only other thing I would say is I actually don't think it's supposed to be comfortable I think a little bit of discomfort is okay depending on where it comes from I think there's discontent that comes from exactly what they hit on which is we keep having the same conversation we're not moving forward and I don't know what the rules are for how we're going to move forward which is I think really so much more frustrating than okay I thought we should have done something different but a decision was made and we're going forward over here which I generally think most people can live with unless it's a really huge philosophical difference which certainly those come up but most of the time those aren't what I see so I think it's really important that the sort of norms of the group and the decision making are set not that they can't ever be changed but that people understand here's the rules that we're going to play by but I also think there's a great book by I think it's Heifetz and Linsky out of Harvard about change and transformation and they give this example of like a pot boiling and how you have to keep it at the right temperature so it's still boiling but it's not overflowing I don't cook so I think that's how it works and I think that's a really important point of like you've got to make it a little bit uncomfortable otherwise nothing's going to change there's no reason to but you don't want it to overflow and cause complete chaos and so what's the right temperature and how do you think about creating that space and container for it and also recognizing the situation where nine women can't make a baby in a month there are some things that just take time there's some things you just can't throw out of resources at and expect that this is going to happen and I think a really wise leader sees the things that need to take time because that is going to be the best result It's interesting it's knowing what's going to take time and allowing a leader that's willing to take the long view and say this is going to take time because it should be a false choice if the world operated properly having really inspired employees or innovating that's going to lead to the best result and you never should make this choice unless you have to care about quarterly results and we're fortunate that we're not public to a large degree we don't care that much about quarterly results we know it's where is this going to be in a year but most people don't get that luxury so it's very unfortunate but I think one possibility that I know bigger companies have done is the skunkworks idea that if most of the organization is going to be completely driven by the financials every quarter create a little subdivision have a little small company that is exempted from all that and let them play and it's worked really well for some of the largest corporations in America so I think we all can do it to some degree Can I just add one thing I probably am screwing up all of your questions but there's such an important point about the public aspect because I think for most of us there is a public component of what we do and that's often the hardest part so I think of Lisa when she came out with the idea we're going to take this 100 year old school and we're going to turn it into a shared kitchen facility and we're going to do it with a grant from the USDA in Warren and you know a lot of people were like hmm okay and it takes I think it's one thing to do it within your organization it's a whole different thing when you've got outside people watching you and you just somebody has to be brave enough to take that and to hold it and to be able to move forward with it so I think of people like her I think of we have now eight innovation fellows and we get them together every once in a while and I think these are folks who are given $300,000 over three years to implement some idea innovative idea for improving Rhode Island and you know it ranges from like curing Hep C in Rhode Island to implementing design thinking in schools all kinds of things and every single time we get them together the biggest thing that comes up is that that role of you know being a transformational leader requiring self transformation in order to do that and having a whole lot of people looking at you and like you know lobbing their expectations and judgment up against you and really what I have found is and what I think our role is just trying to support them in doing that and I think that's kind of our role at the foundation more broadly because it's hard and it takes time everything takes longer than people think it's going to and there's no I find there's no there's point in time judgments but things evolve and some you know it just really requires being sort of courageous and being willing to kind of stand up and let things evolve and take what comes I think that's a really great point in something that's worth recognizing so innovation does require a lot of bravery and dedication and hard work that's an important takeaway for this audience because lawyers are nothing if not risk averse right some of us by training some of us by nature and training so it can be a difficult environment to get that started according to the the same book we mentioned earlier Collective Genius leaders face two basic challenges when they're creating an organization where people are willing to face the hard work that Jessica's talking about the tension and the stress of innovation and then secondly creating an organization where people are able to do the work that it requires so in other words the leaders have to build and sustain that innovative environment so we started talking about this but can you touch on what you have found to be any other successful ways to build or sustain that environment you know Phil's mentioned maybe you have a subset of people that are responsible for innovation and maybe they come up with ideas themselves or maybe they're the ones that are responsible for pushing other people on the team that are you know less inclined to think in that way so is anything else that people want to add on that I think just ask you know I think having a door always open whether it's there's a separate subset that's responsible for it or not but knowing that there's an opportunity for input and just and asking and knowing that you know 99% of what you hear is going to be perhaps not something that's immediately useful but you might get something really good I think nothing builds the environment more than the people higher inspired passionate people who in our case for some just really care about legal research I mean this is a crowd where we all do but it's not the norm in the world and you find those people even if they're not if they just think wow what's happening in analytics and data is so exciting and that's just what they want to be a part of they're going to have that inspiration and I also talk to a gentleman at IBM who's kind of in charge of the innovation team with the Watson group and ask him you know and this was one of his absolute key points was it's about getting the right people who just will keep the because you can't teach passion or caring and so you find those folks hopefully and the other thing is just you know there's something to be said for believing you can do something that's impossible and I often think we're losing this as a culture overall there's a story I hope and believe it's true I've been told it's true from I think it was Princeton or some as a math department and a student comes in late to class and he's down the problem set you know for problems whatever goes home solves one of them wasn't the problem set the professor was saying well these are four of the you know completely undoable unsolved major problems you can't just do that in a week well maybe you can if you actually believe it is solvable and so if you just wherever you can do to build that ethos of yeah I don't know how we're going to do it we'll find a way and then sometimes people believe it it's like that suspension of disbelief and an idea you know in team meetings when you say let's just throw out ideas and let's just hold them for a minute and let's all pretend like this is going to work what would that look like if this really worked and I think investing in people to not just supporting them but investing them I think people need professional development and again this group of people that is so challenged with what the task that is ahead of them and and you know you have to invest in people and realize how fast technology is changing how fast you know you just can't by osmosis absorb all of that I think you have to be willing to put the resources out there to invest in staff for sure I think that the expectations is a really important point too I was asking some people at the law school the other day about that what role does our expectations of others play in their success and there's a lot of great research now talking about the difference that it actually makes between two different people similarly situated when one has different expectations than the other so a fun question can you talk about the role that failure plays in an innovative organization we have to assume that not every idea is going to work in your experience of failure I consider myself an expert because I really believe that getting it wrong is the first step to getting it right you have to life is just the culmination of failure that's what every moment the moment that we're in right now is the sum total of all the things you have failed at I thoroughly believe that and we just don't ever think that we can't talk about in our culture it's almost like the f-word or something like that it is the f-word it's the new f-word I guess but failure is it's critically important it's critically important in education it's critically important in a startup environment and that was the absolute basis of hope and main is because you have to understand that people need time and space to fail for a business startup and when you're in a very expensive business like food where the infrastructure is expensive you can't go develop a food business is like developing an app in your garage you've got to be in a code compliant environment you have to either build a kitchen rent the kitchen make this huge investment and if you make a decision and all of a sudden that was a bad decision then everything ends and you mortgage your house and that's not a good that's not good for the economy so we wanted to stimulate this environment and create this environment where people can fail fast and move on so a great example was a professional chef from Johnson & Wales and he's been there many years, he's a pro and he had a chocolate business and he started off going in one direction with this business he named after a dead uncle it was like not a great brand but the product was good but the brand wasn't catching on and fortunately he didn't make the investment in the direction that he was going because he ended up scrapping the whole thing and moving in a 180 degree different direction but fortunately he's just renting a kitchen and so he had no it was easy for him to take that risk and I think the point about being so public when you start something it's so public and we have to be in it with the person who's doing that and not sitting out there like a reality show and waiting for the contestant that gets voted off the island because we're just this culture of failure's not okay we actually have to encourage it because people have to realize that there's life after failure and it's actually a better life it's a better life after you have failed I'm going to just jump in very briefly because there were so many great things in there so one is creating the environment going back to the previous question in which failure is an option understanding that not every idea is going to work out also the timing of the failure can be very important how do you know when to let go of an idea when it's really not going to work that's a really difficult thing to grasp and Lisa mentioned my students have been into her organization before to do presentations on legal topics that brings to mind for me what do you not want the reason for failure to be so we don't want to see struggling businesses that are not succeeding because they got tripped up in what is really a basic legal problem I just completely agree with that I'm a library point of view so I'm not a lawyer but I'm a big library dork and I think of them as safe spaces I think like a lot of what we're talking about you all have an opportunity to sort of create that place where learning and experimentation things happen before they go out and happen public, shiny in the real world and I think that's such a great opportunity and also a responsibility that comes with that and the other thing I would say is I actually have my issue is with the word failure because I hate talking about success and failure because I think it's just so black and white and very few things maybe in sort of the product world where you launch something and people don't like it and don't use it that's different but in the community change world that's not how it really works it's much more iterative and something I might say right now is a failure because it's not working it's going to take some time and in 8 months we're going to hold it up as a success something that we might hold up as a success today in 8 months could be on the front page of the Providence Journal because there's been some major disaster around it so I just think time plays such a role in how we consider things success and failure and then the last thing I want to say is about the reality show I think we now have this culture of almost like entertainment of watching people fail and I hate it because I think there's this author Bernay Brown who has this quote about Roosevelt quote about being in the arena and she has this quote that is if you're not also in the arena getting your ass kicked I'm not interested in your feedback and I have this quote I have it pasted to my computer and my bathroom mirror and it's in my wallet because I just think it's so important that everyone's feedback and opinion is not equal and the people who are going to sit back on their couch and make this and with a bowl of popcorn whatever but the people who are out there with you trying to make things different and trying to make things happen those are the people you want to engage with you want to support them it's a little bit of a no I love that perspective and I also like that if something doesn't work out you're not failing you're just ahead of your time right that's a fantastic take away I just say when people say why is the US typically leading the world in innovation why do we have Silicon Valley folks often point to our bankruptcy system you can try and fail and there's no huge stigma and your life isn't permanently destroyed and that's true for the person and for the company and you never it's awkward talking about that but that's how it's supposed to work and it does work and then there was a program at the PLL summit which I realize probably most of you didn't get to because there wasn't a lot of law school folks there but there was I believe a Wharton professor who did a workshop on innovation and they had done studies in the class to follow everyone has 20, 30 ideas and what looks good and the next stage what looks good and what finally turns out to be pretty good it's often idea number two or four of the first rankings that turns out to be good so if you didn't try four of them and have three of them not work out so well you never would have gotten to the good one the one that looked best in the beginning was not the one that ended up the best it's just the way it is so so that and then finally I guess the role of the library again Ed my co-founder he likes to say data is the new oil in the old days you had the wildcatters who would run out and try to do it well some of them just went bankrupt and some did really great but they were the innovators so who are the wildcatters who can be the wildcatters today and it's you guys because you have the data and you have to unfortunately stick your head up a little bit that most of the professors and the partners and whatever it is they're not going to they don't want to they're trained not to but in this room we can and with access to things no one else really knows about or is thinking about so so there's really some nice opportunity with a little willingness to publicize hey we're trying this and some sometimes it won't work oh I'm sorry oh sorry do you mind if we take an interim question? please yeah I think that's actually a great transition into our next question so I promise that was not a plant that was done on purpose but the next question is what role does a shared sense of purpose or values of an organization play in encouraging innovation so if the problem that you're having is the viewpoint of the organization then in your organization how does that shared sense of purpose or value system play into encouraging innovation and I would add maybe even to any of you have innovation included as part of your strategic plan and does your organization have a strategic plan if so is that helping you as well? I actually the foundation convenes a group of eight industry associations so these are folks like the Rhode Island Manufacturers Association Marine Treats Association Defense Association and they are struggling with the exact same thing that you were talking about and our program is a capacity building program so we look at it less as at the programmatic you know what they're doing and more as their organizational health and how we can help support that and the biggest thing from that perspective that I've seen is really supporting them as people and I really I know it sounds hokey but it comes back to that bravery thing because they are you all are in a position of responding to the needs of your clients or your users and positioning your institution for the future and sometimes those are completely you know different directions and I think that is really hard emotionally and mentally much less just time like how do you cross that so the supporting you all in like the personal growth and courage that it takes to do that I think is really important and again it kind of sounds a little bit like a cop-out answer but I do believe it I also believe in allies and maybe being a little Machiavellian in terms of how you how you mount an opposition campaign because I totally hear you on the maniacal and they can be overwhelming and I think you have to be fairly ruthless in you all know you're not alone and you're not just making this stuff up and so you know find the people who can be your allies and be your cheerleaders and you know be I think fairly strategic in terms of trying to build support for that we do have innovation in our strategic plan it's interesting because I never really thought about before like does that matter I mean it matters of course it matters I can't say go back to it every single day where it has been helpful is when the maniacal forces are sort of pushing back on it to be able to go back and say hey wait a second you approve this and this is in here and I think and because it gives you permission I think in a way and so if you're able to get some sort of if you're able to get some permission even if it's only this much and you can stretch it into that much I feel like it's key I don't know if those are at all answers to the question I think that's helpful if you can get a chance to participate in your overarching organization strategic plan make sure you get the library in there because a lot of different law schools and law firms and other organizations are looking for some ways to be innovative so make sure you're a part of that comments from others on that point you know the shared mission it can be really helpful especially to your question if there's a shared direction then it makes it so much easier or at least it creates a possibility you can make it this other person's idea and like oh now I so agree with you that this is the key problem and where we need to go we all agree that this is what we're trying to solve and you know so how should we do that and oh we could and kind of make it not something that you want to do just because it makes a lot of sense but you're helping them solve their problem because they were so brilliant in the first place to set that direction and it's a little Machiavellian in a way but you know I wonder sometimes and sometimes I think of our strategic plan or just specifying what are the questions we're trying to solve and if everyone's thinking of the same stuff it gets the innovation aligned and gets does prevent some of those barriers but it doesn't I'm sure it doesn't really make it easy because if someone's dug in yes I agree with this but your solution is just wrong because I know more about libraries than you do I like that complimentary approach I think that would probably work very well in the law firm environment some of you would probably agree Lisa did you want to add anything? I go back and forth between these different worlds so I'm working with a very small nascent non-profit and then I'm here in this big behemoth place and always thinking about how you can be an entrepreneur how you can get small wins I love to say we're all in this alone people are already talking about you realize that there are people you can entrepreneur with and I like to say go where the energy is even in a big organization find some like-minded people because that's going to be the group that can get some things done and don't sort of look at this as a big lets we have to eat this elephant in one bite and change so often it feels like that so I always encourage my staff here to be an entrepreneur find the places even if it's on the fringes where you see change and where you see energy and I think my other point I'm just so fortunate to be able to do this is I know that the future is not a longer version of the present and partly why I know that is I actually came in to hire it from healthcare and if you want to see the future of higher ed go look at healthcare and it's not pretty you know you can show people there's actually other industries where you can both show people the dooms day scenario and some other options and actually it's very liberating to take another industry as an example because it kind of takes all the politics out of it so and I know the Rhode Island foundation does this all the time where you can look to other industries that have successfully innovated in data and library science and whatever and do a field trip and bring some folks on the field trips both some of your allies and some of the people that you know are the folks that are just going to be dead set against us and let their conclusions reach them because when you can see that the future is not a longer version of the present and this is where things are going but here's some people who solved it and it's really refreshing to get outside your industry and I'm so fortunate to be able to do that all the time. We're going to sort of combine two of our next questions which are on the same theme of teams versus individuals so research shows that or at least some research shows that groups tend to be less creative than individuals and that innovators have a great need to be autonomous. So the question for you is how do you support autonomy and teamwork and then does innovation come primarily from an individual or the organization and if it's the individual how do you get the rest of your team to work with you and I think some of you have touched on that Lisa just commented on building different teams maybe that are not just the obvious team within your organization I think we've had a lot of great comments on that so I would ask so we have time for questions if the panel wouldn't mind giving their literal 30 second wisdom if there's anything else you want to add on that point. I feel we covered it for some people. 30 seconds the key it's from the individual I think you do need the brainstorming and I don't know so I like the groups more than just individual and the key whether it's the individual or the organization I think so often the role of the organization is just to get out of the way. That's a great point and also like when you're building those teams Jessica's take away of building an atmosphere of discontent versus discomfort that those are different things and one is helpful and one is not. That was a really important point. With teams versus individuals I used to do this exercises groups of people and just randomly break them into groups of 10 and I would have this list of the top 10 you know candy bars and I would say at your place you individually write down what you think the top 10 candy bars are and then as a group come up with the top 10 list I did that over and over again and I don't have one example where one person ever did a better job than their group it just never happened because there is this collective wisdom of the groups the problem is groups don't know how to get at it they don't have the skills they don't have the organizational you know dynamics or culture to get at the collective wisdom of the group the group is always smarter and that's why human beings are social beings because somebody understood that we have a better chance of solving problems and surviving as a group than we do as individuals and that is I think our real challenge yeah it's a great point there is research showing recently that groups are actually often right even when they're just guessing a factor figure blindly usually the group as a whole comes incredibly close so we do have time for one or two questions from the audience we have a microphone that will be available that we will hopefully be available that we bring around to you or you can just yell and I will repeat the question for everyone in the back right so for anyone who didn't hear that you don't have enough resources right so if you don't have the funds to allocate to innovation how can you still have that innovative spark I guess I just don't believe that paradigm I think that innovation is working with what you have to solve a problem and so it's not I think it's a false paradigm to think you have to have more to innovate I think actually some of the most the greatest innovations come again kind of from sometimes a point of desperation when you do have less and you realize you still have to solve that problem with the resources that you have I'm not trying to throw a wet blanket on what you're saying but you know look it there's not I don't think there's going to be more I don't think there's going to be more resources in education I see less resources I saw less resources in healthcare and so that's where innovation comes from where are you not thinking of that's out there that is going to solve this problem and it's like I said it's not always about throwing suitcases of money at things it just isn't I think and that's where so many people just give up and say if we only had more money if we only had more resources I don't think it's true I would agree with that innovation is largely thinking and so maybe at the worst case you need time to think it through but sometimes you don't even need that because the idea of your brain having this back burner and sleeping on it and those sorts of concepts are actually true if you look at neuroscience so sometimes the great ideas are going to happen in the car or the shower while you're walking the dog so sometimes you don't even need time or money to come up with great ideas which is a wonderful thing right I mean look at MacGyver like he's always like right at the end like he never really had what he needed or Buffy the Vampire Slayer for people who are like other genres of resourceful heroes by itself we do I think we can do at least one more question yes we have the mic on it's way to you sorry yes this is sort of on just a theme of balancing sort of the old with the innovation so if anybody in the panel wants to comment or if anybody in the audience wants to comment on that specific issue from the library perspective from the library perspective but actually one of our other principles in our strategic plan as well as innovation is balance because exactly what you say so we have to balance donors and nonprofits we have to balance all different sectors the arts and the economy and healthcare we we have donors who don't have email and then we have donors who want to log in to some program and check their fund balance every three minutes and so we are constantly and it's very hard to say no to any of those things when you're a community foundation that serves a state and there are not many other institutional funders in the community I have a very hard time saying no we can't get into this we can't work on this problem because we're you know we're over here so balance is a personal struggle for me and I actually think I think it's hard because I think when you are straddling and when you are trying to do all these things at once it's very hard to free up the space and the resources so I agree that you don't always need new resources but you do sometimes to channel whether it's not even financial resources but just time and attention towards other things and so I do I agree that it can be really hard I think it can be a barrier to innovation I think that you can sometimes do it in small ways and so and that's really to your question as well I think sometimes people think innovation and we see this all the time is they need a million dollars because they got a brilliant idea and they got to go out and they got to implement it up here when you do it down here and actually get a lot of traction really quickly get a huge amount of attention and really start to shift the conversation so I actually think what I give Lisa the most credit for and I give her credit for many things including making that project work but Hope and Main absolutely shifted the entire conversation in the state around the food industry so before it was like yes we have nice restaurants because we have restaurants in Wales and that's great and isn't that nice but you know it's not an economic driver to now food is at the top of the list from everyone who's making all the decisions as an economic driver for Rhode Island and I think if Hope and Main didn't happen that would never have happened and so you've got to look at what your levers are and it's not always I think scale of implementation I think sometimes a very small pilot can actually give you the tools that you need to allow you not to have to balance as much but mostly I just feel your pain on that because it is really really hard and it comes down to time and that's the hardest thing in the world because you can't get more of it yeah that's really helpful so you all can walk away and make sure you shift the conversation to the library right and I'm going to call it there not only because we're out of time but because the concept of balancing these competing interests is a fantastic way to end because that is what it's going to be all about in the end thank you very much everyone and thank you so much to our panelists