Invention and Usefulness at an Innovation Consultancy

Hey, welcome to another episode of Fashion Made. Today I have the pleasure to be joined by two people. I've got Tim Devlin and Sean Lane from Calypso. Hey guys.

Hey there, David.

How's it going? Yeah, very well on my end. How about you?

Doing great.

Doing well, thank you.

Excellent. Excellent. Sean and Tim, you were both at Columbia Sportswear before, in the last year have moved to Calypso. Is that right?

Yes, that is correct.

Fantastic. And for anyone there that doesn't know Calypso, they are an innovation consultancy, which is very good because obviously today that is the whole topic of conversation. I guess my first question to you guys is, I certainly hear the word innovation a lot. I'm sure as innovation consultants you hear it a hell of a lot. Um, I would just really like to get in your experience sort of what does this word actually mean when it gets overused a little bit in, in business chat today?

Yeah, I mean, um, so I, I, you do hear the word innovation a lot. Uh, I think back to, um, some of the environments I've been in in the past, and a lot of the dichotomy came between the distinction of innovation, and specifically in the sporting goods and apparel industry, what would be considered invention. And I think probably the easiest way for me to clarify the two is to think that innovation is the combination of taking something new, taking that invention, and combining it with something useful. So it addresses a problem or an opportunity or challenge that an organization faces and thus creates a new outcome. To me, that's really what the power of innovation is, and that's probably the biggest distinction that I've faced in trying to communicate between the two.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Sean, I guess you'd agree with that.

Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, innovation is a word that is heavily overused, but When you break it down, it really is about making improvements on existing knowledge and finding new ways to approach problems. And in some cases, those can be significant jumps from where we are today to our future, or they can be incremental changes over time. And so we see them in a lot of different ways. In our industry, they can vary from innovations on the products, to the innovation that helps an athlete, for example, perform better, to just simple innovations that make our daily lives easier. And we see lots of different examples of those. [Speaker:CHRIS_BROADFOOT] OK.

And with regards to footwear or apparel, I mean, you guys both had a lot of experience in this area. Can you share with the audience a little bit about that and where you've got your experience from when it comes to innovation in these areas?

Yeah, absolutely. So from my experience, I've been in footwear and apparel industry for about 20, a little over 20 years now, working at some of the larger brands like Nike and Columbia Sportswear, and now doing consulting at Calypso. I've seen it from a lot of different angles, whether it be material innovation, whether it be new advanced technologies applied to either materials or the finished products. A lot of the recent experience that Tim and I have been engaged on is really around kind of the digital landscape and taking apparel, which has, you know, been a relatively slow-moving industry from an innovation perspective, into a new space where virtual garments get created and a lot of the products go through iterations in that space and there's a lot of advantages to doing that.

Yeah, I think that's pretty much what brought Sean and I together. My background and history is a bit varied. I left the finance world and came to something I'm passionate about which is outdoor Outdoor lifestyle, outdoor apparel and equipment, and I found my way to Columbia Sportswear as a buyer, but first and foremost, a previous life gaming nerd who just loved to spend his time and passions in the digital world. So one day I'm finding my desk full of VR equipment and in addition to my normal buying outlay and I'm trying to share this with my colleagues on how this could change and impact our industry, and they think I'm absolutely loony. Along comes a colleague and a peer from Intel who says, "Hey, you should really connect with this guy inside of your same organization. He's working on something you might find quite useful." And, you know, from that was born a great friendship, but also a partnership where Sean and I really kind of helped our company and our previous company and the brand figure out that innovation has a massive context within the digital space currently. And we really started breaking into what digital innovation looks like for sporting goods and apparel or footwear and apparel more holistically, right? Because once you have a digital asset with the emergence of some oncoming technologies, you can pretty much take that asset to the consumer in any means you choose. And it's just something that we're truly passionate and have a lot of fun with.

Yeah, and I think just to add to that, kind of on some of the points that Tim just mentioned, is really, you know, I think innovation is driven out of these crossroads that are oftentimes, you know, different people coming together from different perspectives and bringing something new to the conversation. And I think that's kind of how we see some of the work that we do today is we're really introducing people to new concepts around these new emerging technologies. And through that, through those lenses, we're getting the opportunity to talk to people who have a completely different point of view about how that technology may be used, where its potential lies within an organization, or just how it might benefit themselves on their daily work and what they're doing to build products.

Yeah, that's amazing. Obviously trying to convince people to change is a hard thing, and I guess that's maybe one of the biggest barriers when it comes to implementing innovative strategies or innovative technologies within a company.

Yeah, most definitely.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I think we both definitely agree with that. We've run into lots of different barriers around that where You know, one, is your company ready? Are the individuals, which is really what it's about, are they ready for the change? And I think there's a reluctance for change, and in this industry, I think there's definitely a reluctance to adopt new technologies, although we're starting to see this grow considerably because it's now seen more as a competitive advantage, and if we don't do it, then we fall behind. And, you know, you're seeing kind of the emergence of those changes in retail and how they're impacting brick and mortar and just the accessibility. The other aspect I think that kind of ties into that is you're seeing new entrants into the workplace which are starting to really evolve the thought processes around what innovation is.

Well, I guess if more people are— when you say new entrants to the market, do you mean new people or new technologies? What do you mean?

I mean, you can look at it from both angles. What I was referring to is more of the people entering the workplace.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, because, because, well, even you, Tim, obviously joined and you said you had VR headsets on, on your desk, right?

For sure.

Were you then using those in any of your work, in your research?

I absolutely was trying to figure out how to integrate them. I mean, some of the basic concepts that were there in VR at the time enabled a little bit more function for some of the data analysis I needed to do in the bio role.

Okay.

So yeah, I would experiment with it and try to show that the technology could be used in a different way. But once I figured out that you could combine digital assets into the space and started learning to program some, some of the own, some of my own environments, it totally opened up a new concept. And I think just being able to share that with our leadership opened up some new concepts for what the future could hold for the industry. And it became just, you know, something really powerful for, I think, the strategy of how our company decided to go forward. Um, it's, it's— yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, I think there's kind of just this spirit that sits there, and I'm not, I guess, by definition or, or tenure, a millennial, but by brainwave, I guess I might be. And it just seems like the millennial generation They don't really seem to tolerate traditional environments that don't foster innovation and personal growth or learning. They seem to demand transparency to a degree on what they're engaged in, what they're invested in, and where they're spending their time. And I think that's kind of a trend that's out there and why you've seen some not just new emergence in terms of people into the workforce, but They've also made some incredible startups that have joined the space as well.

Yeah, I think the barrier to entry has been significantly reduced when it comes to getting into different markets, but into the apparel footwear space, I think it used to be that it was a very significant undertaking to get into creating and manufacturing and logistics and development of products and selling those products to now being able to virtually create products, have those manufactured without even having visited the specific place of manufacture, and then have that shipped and, you know, directly to your consumer through your website. The barrier to entry has significantly been reduced, and you're seeing how these new companies are starting to change the way that larger brands think about connecting with their consumers and really delivering on their promises.

We just launched our newest brand on Instagram the other night, and I can't think of how many brands have been launched on Instagram in the last 5 years. But one of the more popular ones in Portland is Portland Gear, which was completely started on an Instagram marketing campaign at first from—

Really?

Oh yeah, a young gentleman from Portland who really was kind of not really sure where he was headed. His name is Marcus, but was in a fraternity in college and enjoyed making t-shirts for parties and things of that nature. Started an Instagram campaign, kind of made a logo of the Portland symbol inside of the P and started marketing some hats and t-shirts, created his own brand out of it. He's grown his business tremendously and it was all born on the back of Instagram and social media marketing.

Well, that surely says that hopefully in a few years cultural change as a barrier to innovation hopefully will be less and less of a barrier.

Hopefully, um, hopefully indeed. I mean, I, I think that there's some shifts around just how the consumer mindset is, is trending. Like, um, we've become, in my mind, with the advent of social media, a lot more, um, reactive and responsive society. I, I expect that that trend will continue And what that does is it changes the nature of consumer behavior to where brand tends to mean a little something different. You see people tending to care more about what's going in, what's going on, and what's behind the things that they choose to consume. And the power of a lot of the technology that's enabling some of the digital innovation that's happening in the industry is allowing the consumer to connect in a new way with it. Not only can they contribute to that construct, but they can collaborate in the development process of the apparel or footwear that they might want to choose to wear.

I think that's so much more common these days than it ever used to be, obviously because it's easy to collect that. And so that co-collaboration is quite an exciting thing.

Yeah, it's exciting for us.

Yeah, definitely, definitely. I think it just opens up additional opportunities. And, you know, I think when we start looking at co-creation for a brand, there's lots of different ways to do that. You can do that internally with your own employee base. You can do that externally with your accounts. You can also go directly to your consumer and start to do co-creation with your consumers. It's just opening up that ability to go in and have input on a specific product that you or your friends and others might purchase.

So, I'm interested to know actually why you guys are now at Klipsa. I know Klipsa is a really great company. Is it that you just get to work with a lot more different styles, a lot more different brands now when you're at a consultancy?

Yeah, I mean, To elaborate just a little bit on that, having been in brands, I think it was a tremendous amount of opportunity and learning both at Nike and Columbia Sportswear. There's inherent challenges within brands, and as an individual who's really excited and really wants to spend time continuing to evolve around the technology landscape, getting exposure to lots of other brands is a definite advantage. And so there's probably a little bit of a selfish part of that, but there's also a passion behind it that, you know, to take what you've learned and to take all that experience and then continue to build upon it with a variety of brands is— it's what gets me up every morning and, you know, sometimes keeps me awake at night. It's definitely— I think that's kind of the key reason why we both decided to make that move.

Yeah.

I mean, I think— I don't think it's unfair to say that there's a fair amount of humans on the planet that are just simply resistant to change.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think when you look out at the landscape of large organizations across America or across the globe, the larger you are in scale, sometimes the harder it is to accept or to instantiate change. Thus, to some degree, plays into the complication of instantiating innovation. And the space that we work in, particularly digital product creation, does something so special and so important to the industry, specifically relating to footwear and apparel, for myself and Sean, that we've always been driven by one motto, which is relentless pursuit of what's right. And when we sit behind the world's 6th most polluting industry and contribute based on sheer consumerism to the pollution of our planet daily, and there's an opportunity that we can see right in front of us just based on helping people understand a technology innovation and helping them instantiate that, then it's the right thing to do to try to reach. And so that's, that's the passion that drives us, um, every day. That's what drives us to want to connect with more brands, to share information, um, to be open with what we know. It's, it's, it's the right thing to do. It's how we can change, and it's a needed change.

So, um, uh, you're not wrong there. Uh, my goodness, it's, um, it's quite scary really when you look at the industry and, um, I mean, it is ubiquitous. It's something that every single person in the entire world, bar a few tribes in Brazil and Africa, you know, play their part in because everyone buys clothes. But at the same time, you're absolutely right. I mean, it's the 6th, I mean, depending on which numbers you look at, it's super high on the list of polluting industries in the world. And it doesn't necessarily have to be that bad, I feel.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think there's been more effort put towards trying to change the hardest parts of the industry to change, and that's really kind of through the manufacturing processes. But what we see is, is there's a lot of waste and there's ways to eliminate that waste. And so by using some of these technologies and continuing to innovate on them within your company, it just opens up the door to you know, make an impact on how much waste your specific company is putting, putting out there.

Yeah, this is the thing, you know, because I spend a lot of time talking about 3D product creation, virtual fashion sampling, fit, and, and sustainability. It's interesting to, to talk about sort of innovation being applied to all of these areas. And I guess that you guys do I guess you don't just focus on one area, right? You focus on all of these things.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we, depending on our engagement, we could focus across all of these or almost none of them as well. So our goal is to focus across as many as possible, but it also depends on, you know, obviously our engagement.

Yeah.

I want to go back to something you said a bit earlier on about change and about change management. And this might sound like a stupid question, but does innovation always mean change?

Well, I think there's a difference between innovation and change management. And innovation doesn't necessarily always mean that it's a change management issue. I think that what's needed to foster innovation from a leadership perspective is a little bit different than what's needed to foster change management. Change management is more of creating a vision, communicating a vision, and inspiring people to lead to that, to follow to that. But when you look at what it takes to lead in innovation. It's about more of creating the space and allowing people to become willing and able to innovate, to thus create that new thing that can solve that problem and/or opportunity for an organization. So for me, I think there's, there's a bit of a difference between the two, and a lot of organizations, I think, kind of struggle around fostering that environment that spawns the innovation. They tend to follow the leader, which is a natural thing, and sometimes leaders just simply aren't comfortable with change. Sometimes it's not— it's just foreign to them, but the environment's not right. So you end up with these great tools that can help spawn innovation, but there's nothing there for it to foster, to grow. There's no there's no water that's being poured on the seeds, and thus you end up with an objective or an outcome that dies on the vine, right?

Yeah.

And I think, you know, I have probably a different perspective a little bit. I think innovation does— they're probably not mutually exclusive. Innovation almost always requires change, and that in and of itself is a little bit scary for a lot of people. I think it's also scary for an organization who's very comfortable with their processes and understands how to execute and get product to market. Going through a significant change is somewhat fearful to a lot of people in organizations. So innovation to me absolutely it creates change. But I also think there's ways to work through that. So change management is an area that I've spent a lot of time in, and I believe that everybody moves through change at a different pace, and it depends on your experience, your background. I think the number of years you've been doing a specific activity, your level in the organization, there's a whole bunch of different things that could impact that.

Sure.

It's important to think about all of those when you are going after something that's new to your company and something that maybe they haven't done before.

So, I mean, you've got this company, right? They're very settled, let's say, in their processes, their people, their technologies, their products. Do they still need to innovate, do you feel? Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Yeah, I would say that it depends on how competitive versus complacent complacent you want to be with your organization. I think you open up a tremendous amount of risk if you don't consider innovation as an important aspect, or even technology, or, you know, materials innovation or process innovation as an important aspect. I do believe that there are a lot of companies that have done well and been successful by not making this a priority. And have continued to prosper, but they leave themselves vulnerable to new entrants, to emerging technologies, to new employees that won't work there because they aren't forward-thinking. So I think it's risky.

Yeah, I'd say that, um, you know, the one constant I think I can guarantee in the world is, is change. Um, well, I think that's a quote somewhere.

I've seen it on a slide somewhere in a conference.

I'm sure it's the one constant you can pretty much guarantee. And while I don't think, um, the change always equates innovation, I think the reason why you, you know, as a company that's, that's, you know, stable with what you're offering, you've steady, you've been doing what you're doing, you're forced to consider innovation is that wherever your target is, whether it's a product you're producing, someone that's going to consume it, whoever you're servicing, they're still in that constant of change. And there's so many times in life where you can look at something today where you've solved a problem or you've created a solution and you rest on that, you look at that, but you look at it again in 10 years, 15 years, and you're amazed by how the need has changed because of the user, because of the person that's on the other side of the outcome. And so I think you, you should constantly, uh, to a degree be looking at innovation because to— in the end, you're, you're looking at how that innovation services, um, a larger population that you're trying to reach. And I would say that that's the case in almost any place you look. Um, whatever you're working on, it has a desired outcome for a desired, uh, population, desired you know, someone you're trying to reach with what you're doing. And that person, that thing will not sit constant for you. Whether it's something in the world or whether it's someone in the world, they're going to change. And, you know, you don't have to change with it, but you'd want to stay innovative to make sure that whatever you're servicing, whatever you're offering, it stays relevant. And that's the risk of not innovating too.

So really, I mean, innovation is progress.

For sure.

Well, I guess I've got one more point here then in all of this is the collaboration aspect of all of this, you know, working together with your fellow stakeholders inside your organization, whether that's at the very top or the very bottom or in the middle, and well as as well as outside of your company as well. I mean, can I just— can you guys explain to me just how important that side of things is?

Yeah, definitely. I think it's really— yeah, I mean, it is. I think, you know, building an ecosystem around, you know, what you're trying to accomplish as a company is important, and the ethos of your company. And so building partnerships around that, that help you to move it forward, but finding mutually win-win situations where you can create a win for yourself as well as potentially another company. We've done that a lot, and I think that's, you know, I think that's one of the skill sets that I see Tim is really strong at, is identifying a lot of those areas where bringing in additional partnerships can drive things forward and create new results that weren't anticipated or expected. And so that collaboration aspect is is extremely important.

I mean, it brings up kind of this concept of, you know, the mindset versus the skill set, right? And so I heard this anecdote not too long ago of a professor who worked in an innovation lab, and I forget which university this was, but they would say that every time they'd get stuck and a process. Uh, they'd go down and find students from, uh, either the English department or the history department and bring them into the lab because they would come in and ask the, the kind of dumb question, right? They'd ask that kind of out-of-the-box question that the expert would obviously say, of course, you know, the, the square peg will not go in the round hole. Well, why can't it, right? Like, so they'd ask that off-the-box question that then pushes the beyond kind of thinking. And so to me, kind of, yeah, it's absolutely important to have the diversity of thought and kind of the mix of opinion when you're working to innovate on something, almost anything. It's just paramount that not only do you have diversity of thought, but you challenge yourself to think beyond your own capacity for what you can conceptualize. And so a lot of times in organizations you'll see that You know, um, the folks in your lab may be the best skill sets, um, machinist, data scientist, um, everyone else thereof. And then you bring in the end user, the layman that's, you know, out running on the trail, and of course you need their opinion. They know nothing about the technology you're building, but they use it every day. Yeah, right.

So Yeah, and I think that Tim's call out there, I think diversity of thought and combining that with shared values is a great way to get to the right result.

It must be amazing, you know, when you guys build products or processes or help these companies in their innovation strategies, when you're building this thing and you eventually get, as Tim was just saying, you know, the customer's feedback at the end when they've got the finished product in their hand, And the feedback that you get from them must be sometimes some things you'd never even thought about, you know, that when you finally get to play with the finished product, you know, whether it's technology, you finally get the honest feedback of someone who's just got that technology.

Yeah, I think the interesting thing there is we've worked with students at various universities and we put some of this technology in front of them, and it's amazing the things that they, they do with it, as well as the thoughts that they bring to it. So, you know, it depends on how you put it. I put some of this technology on my grandparents, and just the amazement that they saw within it— and some of it, you know, is really intuitive, and so they get it even though they may not work with it every day. So We see it bridge a lot of gaps and cross a lot of boundaries.

For sure. For sure, if you want to see something that blows your mind, give it to the kids. They will always amaze you. I'm always blown away. We've done some great work and every time with students, and every time they've just surpassed our wildest expectations. And I venture to tell an anecdote here that goes— I've told for a couple years now, but I have nieces who are now 3 and a half. And it's, it's funny to me because the thought construct for them as they've grown up is that communication, whereas when I was a child happened one of two ways: this thing would ring on the wall and mom or dad would go talk to it, someone was going to take mom and dad from me, or this thing would ring somewhere in the home and someone might be here to play with me. That was communication with the outside world. And yet my 3-and-a-half-year-old nieces know how to work FaceTime and Skype quite well. Um, and the green button means I can call someone somewhere and see them, whether I know them or can even conceptualize of who they are in my life. So I'm just, you know, waiting for the next, the next rounds of innovative thought that come out of youthful generations that have grown up with thoughts of how technology works that are beyond our comprehension because they've never actually known it.

Yeah, when they start ideating and innovating, that's when, uh, stuff's going to get really interesting.

Next level.

Yeah, definitely.

Um, guys, look, I just want to thank you both so much for coming and joining us today on the show. It's been a really enlightening chat about the world of innovation. So, um, thank you very much.

Well, thank you, David, for having us.

Thanks, David.

Appreciate your time.