 the creative life, a collaborative production between Think Tech Hawaii and the American Creativity Association. I'm Darlene Boyger host and joining me today is our guest David Ochi. Ochi is coming to us from, Mr. Ochi is coming to us from Carson, California, where he is the Executive Director of Cal State University, Dominguez Hills Innovation Incubator. He's also recognized for his expertise in innovation and entrepreneurship. So nice to be with you today, David. It's it's truly looking forward to this conversation. Thanks for having me. Our pleasure. So we bring our guests that come to us on the creative life generally are recognized because they are living a creative life, which which you do. But in addition to that, David, you help others to be enhanced their creativity and also specialize in creativity in the context of entrepreneurship. So it seems to me, which implies innovation. So it seems to be that and to many others that innovation and creativity work hand in hand. What do you think? Absolutely. And again, thanks for having me here. What an exciting opportunity to speak with you and a friend from many moons ago. And I think it's great to chat. It's really an interesting collaboration that we find ourselves in, right? When we're working with innovation and entrepreneurship, creativity is just assumed somehow in the middle of that, right? That it's a, you got to be creative to be innovative or entrepreneurial. And there's some truth to that in the sense that there's there's usually a spark, something that identifies as being the opportunity that needs to be, needs to be addressed, right? A problem that needs to be solved or a pain that someone hasn't maybe even found as being a real issue. But without the creativity to see that and to find the opportunities and recognize them and assess them, you wouldn't have all the new startups and innovations and entrepreneurial ventures in business that we find ourselves all over the U.S. enjoying. Perhaps we should start off too by just explaining if you would explain to us a little bit about what the innovation incubator is. Now, perhaps you're an innovation incubator in many ways, but the innovation incubator, am I correct, is a center at Cal State? Yes. So we are a program that's run out of academic affairs. For those of you who are in academia, that means we're not part of the business school or a specific college on campus. We're there for all students. And what we're really there to do is foster that creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial spirit among students, staff, faculty, alumni. And importantly, the community is a big part of that as well. So we're not just looking at taking undergraduate students and pulling them into the center to then turn them into founders of companies. It really is about more than that, helping them link with the community and find innovative ways to foster new businesses. So it's really a big collaboration amongst the community and the campus. And I've been there for about a year and a half, which of course, through COVID really threw some kinks into things. But we're really getting our stride in being able to operate and help students and the community launch new ideas, see what they can do with them. So it sounds like it's a great experience, a great opportunity for you and your students. And during the show, we encourage people to send questions to us at Think Tech Hawaii, and that banner will run from time to time as we're speaking. But one of the questions we have, part of one of the questions is, why is entrepreneurship a good training ground for employees? That's a great question. And it's really the heart of what our incubators really focused on. Many incubators at colleges, there's over 2,000 incubators, accelerators, entrepreneur programs, this sort of thing at colleges in America. And yet the common model is to focus on outreach and have awareness like hackathons and speaker series and even promoting educational elements like a minor or a major in entrepreneurship. And then immediately we throw them into this model of having to do highly scalable businesses. They got to be building the next Google or the next Twitter or Facebook or whatever it is. And that's grand and wonderful. And of course, we're looking for the next Twitter to come around. But as a practical matter, I like to use the analogy of learning to fly, right? Imagine if we, you know, Darlene, you and I decided we want to go become pilots. And so we'd go to ground school and we'd learn and we'd learn all about what lift and drag is and that sort of thing. And then imagine the instructor says, all right, you're ready. And they threw us into a 747 and said, don't worry, fail fast, fail forward, you can do it. It's all right. Be creative and experiment. He's like, wait a minute. Teach me how to take off and get back down on the ground safely. It's like we're missing the whole little micro Cessna type of enterprise. And really what we've done is innovated a new way of looking at an incubator where yes, we want scalable ventures, but we've also built two programs in the middle that are really addressing workforce development, which is a core element of the Cal State systems mission and its purpose is to educate California's workforce. And the skills that an entrepreneur need to learn can be learned in a number of ways, one of which is forming a highly scalable business and being a founder. But not all, all right. There's many competencies that are involved that you can learn by just applying your skills as a short-term intern even for a startup, for example. We created a program called Patapult where we help students who are within a particular degree go work with a startup under the tutelage of a community mentor. So for example, let's say you learned QuickBooks in a class in an accounting program and we then pair you up with a bookkeeper accountant in the field and find a startup that needs their QuickBooks setup. Now you've got a finite goal. You've got students who are staying, we'll call it within their lane at their major, right? They're wanting to be an accountant. They've got a great resume piece which we can give them digital badging to show that they've been able to set up QuickBooks for a client. They of course get a huge network out of it and it's a win-win for the startup, the mentor who's giving back and potentially meeting a new client, maybe finding a new employee out of the group. And the three to five students that were involved in getting that QuickBooks setup, they all walk away with real-world experience and just a flavor, I mean just a tad of what it's like to be a startup. And that's great, but they didn't have to raise their hand and say, I want to be a founder. I'm ready to be the next Bill Gates, right? They instead just said, it's okay. You know what? I'm staying in my lane. And yet we also, the Cessna analogy would be that we like to help students and our community launch small businesses, little micro enterprises that aren't necessarily designed to take over Google and you know, hell Elon must forget Mars. We're going to Jupiter, right? It's not, you don't have to do that. If somebody starting a small little enterprise that earns them five to $500 to a thousand a month can be life-changing, especially we deal with, you know, South LA, you know, our neighborhoods, most of our students are black and brown. I mean, we're up in the high 80 percentile. They have very challenging backgrounds, many of them. Many of them are facing very challenging times that they, you know, that their community, that they face in their community. And for us to be able to help them make an extra $500 or $1,000 a month isn't going to get them venture capital funding, but we'll teach them a tremendous number of skills about supply chain and customer service and marketing and these sorts of things that are valuable skills as an employee. So it's a very long-winded way of saying that entrepreneurship doesn't mean you have to start a scalable business. It means you need to find something that can help you learn some of the competencies of an entrepreneur that frankly every employer is looking for, right? What employer doesn't want somebody who can identify an opportunity and help assess it and say, hey, boss, I think I found something. We could do this a slightly different way and, you know, and we could get benefit from it or they'd be able to creatively problem solve, you know, risk assessment, mitigation, managing uncertainty, the ability to focus and yet adapt. I mean, these are all core competencies that the academic literature has established, especially through work by Michael Morris of Notre Dame. These are competencies that you can identify and they translate very well into being a fabulous employee if you can find them and keep them, right, which is always a challenge. You mentioned, you made reference to an entrepreneurial type person having going to the boss and pitching something perhaps. Does the leader or the boss have to be entrepreneurial in their thinking? Great question. It's actually, it's helpful if they can recognize and understand the skills. But in the end, a lot of times, I'm finding that especially with some of the more established companies, small businesses primarily where they have routine safe been in, they kind of realized that they were, they like to call it, frequently we'll call it old school entrepreneur. You know, this is the one I got it up and running 25 years ago, but now I'm stuck, you know, I need help from some young minds. And frankly, I think that's just self-limitation where they have, you know, defined themselves as not being creative or anything. You know what, we'll overcome that limitation in your brain by getting you an employee who can help you realize everyone's creative. There isn't a person on this planet that doesn't have creativity in them, but it's like a muscle. You got to use it, right? Some of us exercise it a lot more than others. And so it's awkward for some, and that's fine. But it really does, it does make it easier once you use it a bit. And bosses learn from their employees. I mean, how many times have we heard people that are in the middle to latter part of their career say, if I could just get a young whipper snapper in here that can do that social media face plant thing that they've got out there, I'd really like that, right? And that's, they find through that effort and seeing those students and those employees achieve, it usually starts to crack the mold a little bit. And they realize, hey, there's a lot of opportunities for us to think broader about that innovation and entrepreneurship. You referenced a little bit about problem solving. And for those of us who study and try to promote creativity skills in others and to get them on the right path. We can't think about creativity without also thinking of critical thinking. And we know that the creative part provides a process to enable one to generate novel and useful ideas. And it would seem that critical thinking then refines the results of creative thinking. So as you're talking about the workplace, and I think you've made it very clear that certainly there has to be some commonality for a setting that will promote creativity. Tell me a little bit about your center. You mentioned that it's not just limited to students, as we would think of students as being university students, but others. So do you have people in the workforce? You mentioned alum. And do you have older people coming to your incubator? We have wiser people, if that's what you're referring to. Yeah, so one of the interesting things about Cal State Dominguez Hills, it really is born out of the community, right? I mean, it was originally nestled up in the hillside. And after the Watts riots, it got moved by the governor into Carson as close to Watts as they could find the site. And so there's been a social justice and community development mindset from very early on in the campus history. And so when we think about our role as a university, it's not as much about finding those 18-year-old thresholds of high school and getting them out in four years, although we certainly do that and enjoy it. There's really a broad, diverse, non-traditional student, if you will, that several of the people we work with on campus for their degrees, as well as in our center, are in their 30s and 40s. And some of them, I mean, I have one lady that I won't dare to ask her age, but I would guess she's well over 50, that we're working with her on her idea. She's got grandkids. And she was a single mom and challenged by all the fun that comes with that. And it is getting her bachelor's degree now. And good for her. She's racing one of her kids to graduate, which I found delightful. But what they bring are three things that it's the reason I think the community involvement is so important. Many entrepreneur centers at universities don't work with people other than students. At least some of the centers on their campus will just work with undergrad or this sort of thing. But I found in my experience that there's really three things that entrepreneurs in that young age group lack for understandable reasons. One is resources. There are certainly some that have resources. We have a very high Pell Grant eligible, meaning low-income student. We are 87% black and brown. We have neighborhoods like Watson, Compton that are that are a bread and butter student. And that means they don't come from resource frequently. And so an undergrad who doesn't usually create when they're in that situation because of a lack of resource, that billion dollar opportunity. They lack the resource. The second thing they lack is experience because they're 19. And the third, of course, is a network. And that frequently is something that's misunderstood by the youth of how important those relationships are going to be. But if you bring somebody in who's been in their workforce for 10 or 15 years, they have that greater opportunity of resource. It might not be much, but even just a few hundred or $1,000 extra can make a big difference when trying to get an idea off the ground. They have the experience and they have more and more likely to have networks. So one of the things I think is our great goal is to stop thinking of the entrepreneur as being the only person. It has to be the one who came up with the idea. That's always, oh, come on, Darlene, you got to come up with that perfect idea. Where is it? Where's that billion dollar opportunity that you've been cooking in your brain? Let's teach you all these techniques to do that. That's wonderful. At the same time, it's limiting. Why can't Darlene go join a startup? Join a team. In fact, Derek Sivers has a great TED talk that it's only four minutes long or something about how to create a movement and his point kind of boils down to being a follower, being the first follower in particular, is an understated form of leadership. And so why can't we take the community and have them work with students and vice versa? They bring different talents and skills and opportunities to the table. And while the students typically don't have as much resource experience in networks, they certainly bring capabilities that many times the wiser amongst us are cognizant or not are lacking. And it's those relationship-building opportunities that really start to drive the opportunity for these people to really create a difference in the community and their own business. So a lot of words of wisdom. And you're very wise, David, to say that you did not ask that one. I'll translate that as old. Thank you. But you didn't ask the woman her age. And I think that's very wise, very wise perception on your part. Passionate purpose and futuristic thinking are certainly required to deal with solving stubborn issues. And I would assume to come up with entrepreneurial-based solutions. Might that be true? Yes. I mean, one of the things is entrepreneurship isn't linear. You know, many people think there's this linear process, right? We think, okay, I need to have an idea that somehow magically generates. Many people think it's this aha moment that you stumble into while showering or walking down the street or whatever it might be. And it's not. It's usually something germinating in your mind, right? And it's something you noticed before. And it's an annoyance. And, you know, we frequently are excited by problem solvers, right? Creative creativity is a really important element of problem solving. The hidden talent and real skill that entrepreneurs many times have to develop is problem finding, right? It's the identification of the problem that really generates an opportunity because nobody knew we needed iPad until one guy said, hey, you know what? You don't even know that you have this problem. I have found an, I don't know exactly what the problem is, but I know there is a need here that you haven't quite found. And the iPad was born out of it. How about the pencil? The person thought about the iPad and then some years past and now we have a pencil for iPad. Who would have thought to combine those. I really enjoy you talking about the process that you go through and the process of creativity. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention you just talked about things are not done necessarily in creativity in a linear manner. And that's interesting because there are some of us that research talks about stage theories for creativity and there will be our other experts that argue that that's not true, that there is the aha moment. But I think we would all agree that something has to be setting or germinating in our minds and our thought process to get to that aha moment. It wouldn't be that we're thinking about it every day, every moment, but something is accruing in our minds over time that takes us away from that. David, what about globalization? Reportedly, entrepreneurship is embryotic in emerging markets in China and India, which surprised me if in fact that is true in your opinion. If that is true, what is holding China and India back from moving forward in entrepreneurship, even though we know that we receive and have very context with both of those countries? Help me out on that one. Very much so. And entrepreneurship, people many times think, oh, this idea of a startup and this big scalable venture capital kind of idea is either uniquely American or is relatively newly born, meaning within the past couple of hundred years. And the reality is the core basics of entrepreneurship and frankly innovations for that matter are innate. Somebody invented the wheel. We always talk about not reinventing it, but somebody actually invented it. And they had to be creative and they did innovate at the time. And then people innovated on top of that figuring out what to do with the wheel. And people started selling wheels and people have been trading wheat for clothing and entrepreneurship is innate to the human existence. And so entrepreneurship is alive and well in every country and every person, I would argue, in the world. There are rules and conditions and environments that are created either intentionally or inadvertently through culture and government regulations and societal standards and family practices. There's a number of elements that can either enhance or frankly cause problems with the expression of that type of innovation and entrepreneurship and by extension of that creativity. And some cultures are very much pushing and there's plenty of literature about how they embrace creativity and others. Many of the institutions stifle or punish that creativity, especially if it leads to even the smallest of failures. And so when we look at that, when I've spoken in China and Korea and Japan and Europe and Africa and all over the world about innovation and entrepreneurship, there's all these eager minds and ears saying, how do we create Silicon Valley? I want Silicon Valley in my country. And that's why you see all these wannabe Silicon valleys because they think there's some magical formula that you can follow. And the reality is you have to allow the individual to unleash themselves. You have to give them the free reign, the white space even, we call it, where if you have kids especially focused on achieving in 47 different ways because they have to be the perfect honored student and the top athlete and be three years ahead of themselves on their college path. They don't have white space to say, I wonder what would happen if I took this and I threw it across the street. They don't have time for that because they're back into practicing or studying or whatever they need to do. And so culturally, they're just different. And the reality is China is innovating, India's innovating, there are individuals certainly within that are very entrepreneurial, finding problem solutions, that sort of thing. But again, the challenge that culturally many have been finding is that you're not permitted to fail. And that lack of permission to fail prevents people and certainly parents as parents, we don't want our kids to fail. And if we know there's serious consequence to it, we are going to keep them from doing as much as we possibly can, whatever it might be. And so it's really, it's an opportunity for some to, that's why somebody want to come to America. But innovation and entrepreneurship is not uniquely American. It's a bit more in our cultural code to be that way. But I don't think it's going to be that way forever. I think the world is going to globalize. And one of the, just as much as our pop culture seems to be a gift to the rest of the world coming out of Hollywood, one of the side benefits that you're seeing all over the world in many places is that entrepreneurship and innovation is taking root. And so you're seeing innovation hubs and centers all over the world from Berlin to South Africa to Ghana to Australia to Perth in particular, right? Canva, if you're familiar, came out of Perth at Australia. I mean, just amazing things coming out of places that you wouldn't expect. And that trend I think is only going to get more expansive in growth. That's interesting. I've heard you referenced wish-based creative thinking. So how are you using wish-based creative thinking, as you call it, to inspire solutions to massive challenges? So one of the things that frequently comes up with this generation is that they want a company that has meaning. I frequently joke and please no one listening, take offense at this, that a payroll processing company is about as dry a company as you can create. And we don't have college students saying, gosh, I've just come up with a brilliant payroll processing. It just isn't exciting, right? They want something that they feel has meaning. They want to be helping people. They want to be moving a society out of a particular situation or helping the planet or whatever it is. And we all have those wishes, right? Where we want the water to be cleaner. We want people to have better lives. And one of the activities that I frequently do is something I call it I wish. It's innovating wishes into solutions, hackathon, right? So the acronym spells I wish. And what we do is we get a group, I just did this a few couple months ago with some teenagers from some local high schools, we said, what are your wishes? What do you wish about school? Very broad type of thing or the environment or whatever that might look like. And we have them write down their wishes and they're very common, right? We all want to do well in school. We want the opportunity to learn and to achieve and they of course want longer recesses and better food at lunch and you know, these kinds of grand visions. The problem is that's usually where things end, right? It's a wish. And then you're, gosh, I wish I was, you know, I wish I was 10 pounds lighter. No, you're actually don't know what to do with that. Where the change comes in is when you turn that wish into a challenge and it literally, nearly is different. If I say, gosh, I wish I was 10 pounds chowler, 10 pounds lighter, and you reword it in your brain and especially out loud to, how can I make myself 10 pounds lighter? Automatically, my subconscious brain is now thinking. So when we talk about stewing and germinating, if you ask yourself a challenge question, your brain will take over and you'll have that aha moment that we think of it driving in the car because your brain has been thinking about it. And then what we do is with the students, we have them turn those wishes into challenges. It's a simple linguistics change. Say it out loud. And then we say, great, what problems are making this challenge so difficult? And they create, we use design thinking and the creative problem solving processes, right, to, to come up with a problem. And then we say, great, let's use and come up, you know, the same process to come up with solutions. So they're doing a bunch of divergent and convergent thinking. And what they end up with is a wish that turned into a challenge that turned into a particular problem that they identified. And now they've got a solution for that specific problem. But now everything they come up with will have meaning because it relates directly to a wish that they had at the beginning. And so from a corporate responsibility or a social good element, everyone has those wishes in mind. And allowing students and entrepreneurs to have that kind of connection between meaning and a specific problem and solution really allows for them to dig their teeth into it and apply that creative energy and have some excitement about what they're doing. And that is, that is true. And I think also when you're going through a creative problem solving model, some of which you've just referenced, but also to personalize it, those, the change of the thought process and the question, for example, in what ways might I do everything? Very much so. We are really down to the wire here. Before I conclude, give me a typical mistake that a company makes in dealing with innovation. That's an awful way to close. I'll put the, I'll put the biggest one. They create an innovation department and that's where innovation takes place is over there in, you know, third floor down the hall, right? Innovation is everywhere. Every employee can and should be innovative and the company of tomorrow is going to be looking for employees that will make sure that innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity are not just existing but thriving throughout their companies. David, I think that's a great example. And I think to conclude, I was afraid we'd be concluding on the ugly or the bad, but you just turned it around in your response. So I think our viewers appreciate that. We are down to the wire now. So David, I thank you for being with us and to our viewers, you have been watching the creative life on Think Tech Hawaii with guest David Ochi. A couple of takeaways from today's conversation are that creativity is at the core of creative production and innovation. And an innovation doesn't happen overnight. Innovation requires time and endeavor to generate something innovative that will make a difference. And as David says, innovation doesn't take place down the hall. So join us in two weeks for another edition of the creative life. Until then Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.