Podcast transcript: Why not all disruptive innovations are truly disruptive

36 mins 41 secs | 10 October 2023

Intro

I think innovation is a bigger process than invention. But innovation is the process of taking that idea all the way to market and creating something that people are motivated to buy and that they understand.

Announcer

Welcome to the Decoding Innovation podcast series, brought to you by the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, where we explore the innovative technologies, business models and ideas that are shaping the future of industries. During each episode, Mitali Sharma, a principal in the EY-Parthenon Strategy practice, meets with stakeholders at the cutting edge to discuss innovations in their space, challenges they need to overcome and their outlook on the future.

Mitali Sharma

Hello and welcome. I'm your host, Mitali Sharma, and today's topic is innovation commercialized. Our guest is Pete Foley. Pete is an independent consultant who uses behavioral science to shape, enable and accelerate innovation. Pete, welcome to the show.

Pete Foley

Thank you. Nice to meet you.

Sharma

Nice to meet you, too. Before we start diving into the topic, Pete, would you mind sharing your background with the audience and your journey so far?

Foley

Sure, happy to. I've got a bit of an unconventional path, or suppose everybody thinks that I’m unconventional, but I left school at 16 years old, joined an accountancy firm where I was an auditor or a trainee auditor. I got bored with that after a couple of years and joined a big pharmaceutical company. And that's where I really realized that I liked innovation.

And I also realized that I like technology, but I also realized that I needed an education at that point. So I left and went to university when I was about 21, which is quite late. And there I studied chemistry, economics and math, and then took a PhD in Chemistry on what would probably be called environmental chemistry now, though that didn't exist at the time. From there, I migrated away from technology toward consumer-facing and innovation-facing activities. And eventually that took me into applied psychology, which is to say it's a bit of a weird journey. But the reason I got into that was because we started looking at why or how innovation really happens.

And I've got a lot of different patents and I've done a lot of inventions. So I was one of the people who was asked to try to uncode what the innovation process is. And by definition, to understand the innovation process, you've got to understand how people think. And that got us into lots of different areas of psychology.

So, I spent my last eight or nine years at what we call behavioral science, but it was really a whole series of different spaces in psychology. I was lucky enough to – one of the benefits of working in a really big company is I was lucky enough to work with consultants who were some of the best psychologists in the world.

So I kind of got a post-doc in psychology, which was absolutely awesome, and I caught the bug. So I still publish in psychology with various people, as well as actually doing practical innovation, applied psychology as well.

Sharma

That's a fascinating background, Pete. It would be an appropriate time to start with a basic question. Tell us how you think about innovation and how does that differ from, say, invention?

Foley

Well, I think innovation is a bigger process than invention. Invention is coming up with an idea. Leonardo da Vinci coming up with the helicopter was kind of an invention, but it's not an innovation in my mind, because it didn't actually turn into anything. It was more of a cool idea. For me, innovation is a process which starts with a really good idea or really cool technology that has the potential to appeal to consumers or people.

But innovation is the process of taking that idea all the way to market and creating something that people are motivated to buy and that they understand. So it's a much more complex process. And because of that, it's much more a team sport as well. You can sit there and have ideas on your own, but there are very few examples where one person can take something from the ideation stage all the way to something that goes into market.

Sharma

You've written about something called featuritis. Can you talk to us about that?

Foley

Yeah, sure. For me, featuritis is something which it's very easy to fall into, especially if you're an innovator in an organization working for an established product or brand. And what I mean by it is when you start adding little benefits that are not central to the core function of the product.

And there's a lot of pressure to do that. When I work for a big company, someone is always banging on the door and saying, “Can we have something to talk about in market?” And often improving the core function of a product is quite difficult, especially if you're in a mature field. But so it's easy to add something in like a new perfume or a new button or something like that.

But the danger of that is you can start to dilute the core benefit if you don't do it well. So, a classic example for me would be the TV remote, which most people use to turn on, change the volume or switch the channels. But when I pick up my TV remote, it has about 25 buttons on it that I've never used.

What's the point of that? And, I think, we do this all the time with products and, sometimes it works a little bit, like a cup holder to a car is actually quite useful. It's not central to the core function of a car, but I think we also start to add some things into products which are maybe not essential and they start to dilute and get in the way of what that product is.

Sharma

So how do you break away from thinking incrementally? Because most companies, it's easier. It's less taxing on the internal organization, less risky, faster to be incremental than to try thinking of improving the basic function or coming up with a new functionality that appeals to the consumer.

Foley

Yeah, I think there's a number of things. First of all, I think it takes a certain amount of courage on behalf of people who work in innovation. They're the ones who are going to be more in touch with the consumer, quite often, or at least the consumer insights people. So they've got a responsibility to stand up and say, “If we're just doing this for claims, that's fine.

But be aware of the fact that this can subtract. So, some of it is just knowing your consumer and someone in their team would say no. I mean, often a lot of the pressure to add these small incremental elements to a design comes from people who are further up in the organization or people who are very much on the financial marketing side.

And that's great. But the people who are really connected to the consumer have a responsibility, I think, to stand up and say whether something really is a good idea or to be clear, if you're doing it for purely copy or claim purposes or if you're really doing it to add value to the consumer. I think that primarily it's the responsibility of individuals within the organization who have the knowledge, who are connected to the real needs of the consumer people – the people who are boots on the ground or are actually doing the work.

But you also do need a culture within the organization that allows people to do that. So organizations which are open and willing to accept feedback and pushback from other people doing the work are going to be far more effective at weeding out nonessential or potentially detracting features than organizations which are very top-down. So there's multiple elements to this.

There's never really one thing that you can do to solve it – culture and people.

Sharma

I understand that. And you've now worked with organizations of all sizes. Where do you think innovation resides? Is it with the scrappy startup? Is it with a big company, with all the resources? Or is there another formula for innovation which resides in going back to your point in the behavioral aspect of people working on it?

Foley

I mean, it's a great question and it comes up quite a lot. Are big organizations or small organizations better at innovation? I don't think that there's a clear definition or distinction between the two that one is necessarily better than the other. I mean, a lot depends on what you're trying to innovate. So, if you're innovating something that doesn't take an enormous amount of resource or an enormous amount of expertise or an enormous amount of money, then I think the advantage is with smaller organizations, they usually got less bureaucracy to fight their way through, more freedom to make intuitive decisions.

And one of the big problems with innovation is the stage-gate issue and control of resources and the need to get consumer research at every step of the process, which often doesn't really tell you that much. But it's more for internal comfort than, actually understanding what you're doing. So, if you're a small organization, you bypass an awful lot of that.

But I've also worked with small organizations who struggle because they don't have the resources to produce great prototypes or they don't have the connections to get things manufactured effectively, and they don't have the experience of anticipating the issues they're going to get as you move toward market. So, maybe the ideal is a midsized organization. I don't know. Or maybe it's some hybrid of the two.

Some of the skunkwork approach is where you pull a small organization inside a big one, where you've got some of the elements of hands of management, but also access to resources. I think it works quite well, but so much depends on what you're trying to do. If you're trying to build a nuclear reactor and you can't do it as a startup. But if you're trying to create an app, then a small organization is going to be much better at doing that than a big multinational.

Sharma

What's your opinion on like ethnographic research where you're following the customer actually interacting with the environment where their product would be placed maybe with the same product?

Foley

I'm totally in favor of getting the context as close as possible to reality. No research is really going to be representative of reality. If it's for an online service, then maybe you can get much closer. But I think the idea of immersion and embedding yourself with the person using it gives you much more insight because you're observing them in a real context.

The other thing I like to do is what we call disguised choice research, where the consumer doesn't even know what question you're asking. So, as an example, if I want to know what product they're going to pick off the shelf, I ask them to do some task. I bring them in and ask them to look at pictures or products on a computer and they think that's the research.

And then at the end of the research, put them into a supermarket like environment and say, “Oh, your reward is to spend US$50 in the supermarket,” and they go and do that and that's the test. So they're not trying to impress you. They're largely unaware that they're being evaluated at that point, and they're in a very real environment, so they make some real choices.

So the idea of disguising the question you're asking is a very powerful one, because it means that you're not influencing the results. One of the problems with that ethnographic is it's great. It's much better than a lot of other methodologies. But if you're standing looking over someone's shoulder while they're doing something, that impacts their behavior, it's unavoidable.

So the further you can distance yourself from being an obvious observer, the better.

Sharma

How do companies continue to innovate even when they're market leaders so as not to fall in the featuritis conundrum? How do they make sure that they are close to the customer and they're adding features that the customer cares about?

Foley

Yeah, you're asking very good questions. I would frame my answer to a slightly different question, which is how do you continue to deliver meaningful innovation once you've got an established product? Now that meaningful innovation can be within the core product you've got or it can be in side products as well. But the danger is that you become so focused on your core that you get more and more incremental.

So how do you get away from doing that? That's really a culture and leadership issue as much as anything else. We've got a really profitable and effective product. The temptation from an organizational point of view is to pull all your resources into that because the returns are more guaranteed and you're probably going to get a better ROI on what you're investing.

But, of course, eventually that runs out because as you build up capability and a central function, eventually you get into the law of diminishing returns. I worked on dishwashing liquid for quite a few years and the core thing with dishwashing liquid is to remove grease. And in reality, you can only get so good at that even if technically you're 10% better than you were last year. Consumer doesn't notice, it is just a dishwashing liquid. And this happens with, I think, a lot of products where they deliver on equity and then eventually they get to the point where they're doing a really good job and then competition catch up. So, you've got to diversify.

Sharma

Fascinating. So, what you're talking about is leadership at the top that needs to drive disruption, not just improving the performance of the current product or enterprise that they're responsible for. And that translates into then the culture of the organization where they are ready to take risks. And then you also are talking about adjacency planning. So you need to think about not just your core product, but what could that product or the underlying technology be applied to which could enhance or get you into segments that you're not currently operating in.

Foley

Absolutely. And that's efficient use of your expertise. An innovative culture has expertise, it has passion, it has resources and it gives people a certain amount of autonomy as well.

Sharma

You talked about the stage gate and seems like you're not much of a fan. So if it's not stage gate, which is a way that organizations use to control resourcing and control the progression? How do you think about creating maybe some structure around innovation and then balancing it with what you just talked about — the autonomy aspect. What would be the mechanisms for doing that?

Foley

I'm not keen on stage gate in the way I've seen it operate in a lot of organizations. I have nothing against some level of structure or control, but what I've seen increasingly is situations where the stage gates get so close together that you spend more time working against the stage gates than you do against the innovations. I was working with one large company where we had a major stage-gate analysis every three months, and you can never get anything done because you're always working against the stage gates. So, I think you do need some level of accountability within an organization. I love these models where they give people 10% of their time to go and play. I think it is very effective, but 90% of the time you need some kind of accountability. But I think it needs to be on a timeline that is commensurate with what you're trying to do. If you're trying to come up with really big ideas, then don't expect someone to come back with results every three months. That's not going to happen. And I think when you try to create too many stage gates, too close together, you drive incrementalism. Because if someone's got to deliver something in three months, then that delivery time becomes the goal far more than actually delivering something big while that's going to delight the consumer.

Sharma

It makes a lot of sense. What's your opinion on expertise? You talked a little bit about how an organization can take its core expertise and think about adjacencies. In the world today where industries are converging, how are experts going to be playing a role or what kind of role would they be playing?

Foley

Expertise is an interesting thing to define, because what is expertise? There's lots of different types of expertise. There's very narrow expertise. There's the person who knows absolutely everything about a very narrow topic. And there's my favorite type of expert, which is what we call the T-shaped innovator, who knows a lot about one or more topics, but he's also very curious about a bunch of others.

I think you need both in an organization. If you're working on something which is very technical, you need that expert who really, really deeply understands what you're doing.

But most big ideas don't come from experts in a field. There's always more than one expert in a field. And if you go to the expert, nine times out of 10, you're going to get the same advice from the expert in one company as you are from the others. So you end up in these arms races where they all do really good work, but they progress at roughly the same speed.

But often the really disruptive idea is coming from someone who is not the expert in the field. So, what you need is people who can understand enough about the core problem but also have enough knowledge of a bunch of other areas so they can go and look at other potential solutions or bring ideas in from outside. I was working on some of that not long ago where we were looking at supply chains and we ended up realizing we had a flow problem.

So we went to fluid dynamic models and we used fluid dynamics to solve some of the problems we had. Now it required a little bit of jiggling because fluid dynamics doesn't actually precisely map over lorries and warehouses, but there were a lot of the principles that were the same. But an expert in shipping or logistics probably wouldn't have gone to fluid dynamics, and that just allowed us to get a slightly different perspective and solve the problem in a slightly different way.

And I think it came up with a better innovation than we would have done if we just got to the expert. So I think we need all of those. And the other problem with experts today is things are moving so fast that, you know, unless the expert is really good at staying current or being very flexible, they've got pretty short lifetimes nowadays.

Sharma

That brings us into the question of hiring the right talent. What's your opinion on what kind of people lend themselves into enabling innovation within an organization?

Foley

The hiring question, if I can kind of address that first, when I was working for a long, quite large company, we took a very different approach to that. I mentioned that we were very interested in psychology and understanding how the human mind works and hiring psychologists, especially the really good ones, was not terribly easy. There wasn't a lot of them and a lot of them weren't really interested in coming to work for a large company. So what we did instead is we took our budget and we used it to bring in consultants and that had a number of benefits. One is it meant that instead of having a week of someone who was pretty good, we could get a day of someone who was absolutely brilliant. And I thought the results on that was great.

It allowed us to tap into different areas of expertise as needed, so we didn't have to commit to one particular type of cognitive psychologist or behavioral economist. When we had a particular problem, we could go and find the expert who applied to our particular problem. So it gave us enormous flexibility and agility and you also want to relate it to people.

So if you had a problem that involves, let's say, evolutionary psychology, you could engage someone for a month, solve that problem, and then they went back to doing what they were doing. And you weren't trying to work out how to place them in another job or another role. The potential to tap into consultants or people who aren't directly employed is one way of solving a lot of the hiring challenges and of really getting targeted agile expertise.

Sharma

You apply behavioral science to innovation. Can you describe your approach in a little more detail?

Foley

Yeah, absolutely. As said, it's more psychology than behavioral science. Behavioral science is just a way of talking about it. It doesn't sound as academic or scary, but it's really applying psychology to the innovation process. And the reason for doing that is all of that, we talked about the innovation process being a longish process from ideation all the way to delivery.

But at every step on that path, you're dealing with the human mind. At the beginning, you're all trying to deal with how people define problems or how people express problems. And at the end of the process, you're trying to work out how to effectively communicate what you've done or what you've created, and also how to motivate people to buy it. And all the way through that process, it involves understanding the human mind so that's why we got into psychology.

If you then break that down, there're different parts in the process where I think it's particularly useful. Probably the most important one is what is a big idea or a big invention as opposed to an incremental one. What is the definition of disruptive innovation? Because everyone's working on disruptive innovations.

That is right. You go into an organization, I had it at one of the big companies I worked with and everybody was working on disruptive innovation. Sometimes the disruption was changing the performance. It really wasn't disruptive innovation, but everyone thought they were working with disruptive innovation. But what is disruptive innovation? And I got a definition for it to some degree, which is different from the standard, but it's something which is surprisingly delightful.

It's something which when someone encounters it, they understand it very easily or fairly easily, but they are surprised by how good it is or how different it is or how new it is. But they're surprised in a way that they understand. It's, sort of, why didn't I think of that type of structure? And if you look at psychology, there's a format for that to some degree, and it's actually based on the psychology of understanding humor.

And when you're telling a joke, what do you basically do is you set an expectation. So, the human mind is an anticipation where we are always trying to think what's going to happen next so it's fairly easy to set an expectation. But what you do then is you break that expectation, but you replace it with something which is better, but that you automatically understand it better.

And from a psychology point of view, when you go through that process, whether it's a joke or whether it's learning something new, when you replace your expectation with new but useful information, you get this little dopamine hit, but that dopamine hit makes you feel good. But it also cements that idea in your head or that that new concept in your head.

And then the next time we think of it, you remember feeling good. So, it's a very powerful way of thinking about innovation. And I always try and think when we're working on something, can I get to that point? Can I get to something that is going to create that wild moment? Or can I get to something which when someone uses it, it's going to be, why didn't I think of that?

Sharma

Pete, this is fascinating, how you are connecting how the brain responds to a new idea with the idea itself. You talked about ideas being great, but sometimes getting stuck somewhere in the process. How do you deal with that? What have you seen in your career and what would your advice be to people working in the field?

Foley

Yeah, that's a great question and I think this happens a lot. The execution in innovation is a process, and execution is every bit as important as the initial idea. And this is often about we don't get the execution right all of the time. And I think a lot of the time the way you have to unpick that is observational research.

We talked about that earlier, but often the devil is in the details. So, I've worked on products which were household products, where the product got stuck under the sink and it was a great product. It did exactly what it was supposed to do, but it was never available to the consumer at the time when they wanted it. There was a barrier which is they had to remember it and then go and pick it out from under the sink and then use that. A lot of the time, that didn't happen. But you didn't, no one really expected that to be a problem when it was being designed. It wasn't until you went into someone's house and watched that you realized that was the problem. And then the solution in that particular case was to make a design that sat up beside the shelf where it was available and visible, so people would automatically grab it.

And a lot of the time this gets back to this system one, unconscious barriers. If something is difficult to understand or is difficult to physically access, then it stops people engaging with it. But they probably won't tell you about it. I'll give you another example. We had a product which was quite large in supermarkets and it wasn't moving.

The big size wasn't moving as much as we expected. It was better value, but no one was really picking it up and it was big, but it was light. We ran an experiment where it was another of these disclaimer choice tests I talked about where we got people to go and pick a product off the shelf and on one, we put this very simple handle, just a piece of plastic. And on the other one, we didn't have this handle and it was like 75% of the people walked off with the one with the handle. If you asked them why they picked that one, no one could tell you. So it was purely unconscious, but the size of it was an unconscious barrier. So they were picking the smaller size when you put the handle on there. They didn't think about it, but they grabbed it. And other things which relate to this is a supermarket problem. But often if you're a new product, people will tell you in focus groups that they love the idea. But when they go into a supermarket to buy something, they're in a hurry. They've got lots of other things.

They don't have anything like the cognitive bandwidth, the amount of thinking time as they have when you're doing research. So they just walk in and they grab what they've always grabbed. And the new stuff is often completely invisible. If you understand enough about visual science of what grabs attention, you can design things which grab attention, but don't grab attention to the point where they're avoided.

Because a lot of our selection process is a deselection. We just ignore stuff we're not interested in. So this is delicate balance when you're creating a visual representation of a new product where it has to be both intuitive and different, which gets back to that structure of, well, it meets expectations, but then changes. And that varies from product to product to product, but you've got to have just enough that you fit the prototype of the category so people intuitively understand it, but also enough that they go, “Oh wow, that's a bit different, let me engage with it.”

And that I think is really how you solve a lot of these problems, because 90% of the problems I've encountered have been executional either in actual use or at the point of purchase where people just don't really get it or don't have enough time to understand what you're offering.

Sharma

You have written about resilience conundrum. Talk to us a little about that.

Foley

I think this is one of the most interesting challenges for an innovator, because virtually every project I've worked on, at some point, we've reached a stage where it's like, “Yeah, that's great. Now how do we make the finances work?” And that’s when you start squeezing the idea. Sometimes it's slicing the salami, sometimes it's finding smart ways to produce it more effectively.

It's efficiencies in distributional manufacturing. And that's a reality of the innovation process. But the other thing that I've found is I can't think of one innovation that I've been involved in that didn't have to be fine-tuned or adapted or changed after it went into the market. Because back to the whole thing with consumer research, consumer research never really predicts reality.

So when you go into the market, you always find something you didn't get quite right, even if you got it mostly right. It's always stuff you've got to adjust. And an awful lot of the time, the process of getting the finances right means that you've adapted or sliced or fine-tuned your product or your manufacturing process to such a point that you've got very little flexibility left. And then when you have to make those changes, it usually costs more to make the changes a year later than it would have done if you'd left a little bit of wiggle room when you'd first come to market.

And that's why I call it the resiliency conundrum, because we usually optimize most of the resilience out of a design in an attempt to get the finances right. And then it costs us more to go back and fix it later. So the question is, how do you think about it and design a little bit more resiliency in and a little bit more wiggle room into it, but still get the finances to the point where they actually work?

And the reality is we always get there with the finances, in the end. So it's really a case of taking a slightly longer view in the way that you manage innovation and just acknowledging the fact that it's not going to be perfect. So how can I build a little bit of wiggle room?

And so is that going to be a better long-term financial outcome than optimizing the absolute hell out of it before you go to market the first time, and then having to work through and undo and unpick and redesign?

Sharma

So are you talking about piloting a program or a product, learning from it and then going back to it?

Foley

Yeah, I think a lot there depends on what the innovation cycle times are. I do love test markets. I know they're not popular because it tips your hat to the competition but especially if you're in a long lead time cycle of innovation, you've got some room to test market. But test markets are wonderful ways and I’ve been applying that to manufacturing, or wonderful ways to actually get real experience and to make sure that your design really is right.

And then when you fine tune based on real-world experience rather than your best guess of what's going to happen. Where possible, I do like test markets or make experiments if you like.

Sharma

What would be your advice to companies stuck in the conundrum of being incrementalist? How do they get out of it and become more disruptive in the space, whatever space they're operating in?

Foley

If you're stuck in a rut or the classic one where your innovations are becoming increasingly small, and you're putting more and more resource and getting less and less ROI on that resource. So that happens all the time. I think at that point you have to step back and say that there's one or two things I need to do.

I even need to take my expertise and apply it in a different area. I need to open up new markets. I don't know if you remember it, but it's related to the Blue Ocean Strategy — I can't remember who wrote the book, but it was a very interesting book about 10–20 years ago. So can I use my technology to open up new markets so I get to better ROI on it?

And the other one is just to be honest and say, “Well, is there a jump I can make in this product if I look at what the consumer is looking for? I'm fine-tuning along the vector. Is there a big jump I can make in the performance of this product?” So, the auto industry again, they have been fine-tuning and fine-tuning and fine-tuning and adding little bits here and there.

But the move to autonomous vehicle, which is a massive jump. Now, how quickly that will happen, who knows, but that is really a disruptive jump. But it's taking our existing technology proportionate unto a new technology growth. But so much of it is awareness. I think we get stuck in a rut as organizations as much as we do people and we get very focused on equity, and can I improve the comfort of my car, the speed of my car, or the cleaning potential of my detergent and, that law of diminishing returns. So it's really about stepping back and evaluating from a consumer's point of view. Is this meaningful? And if not, how can I use what I've got to really be meaningful?

Sharma

You talked, I think, throughout about culture being so important. How big a role do you think the upper management plays in setting that culture versus you talked about people on the ground doing the work?

Foley

Yeah, I think that's probably the biggest single factor in how good a company is at when innovation is culture. I don't know whether Peter Drucker actually said culture eats strategy for breakfast. It sounds like he maybe didn’t, but he should have done anyway. The thing with culture is that it applies every day. We have strategies and you can change strategies.

I'm sure a lot of companies are changing their strategies at the moment because they come in under COVID-19 and we're probably going into recession. And that means there's a lot of strategic change. And to some extent, you can deploy strategy down in an organization with relative ease. Culture is something which is very slow burning. I talked about conscious and unconscious decisions; a lot of culture really impacts how people behave unconsciously.

It's the risks they're willing to take. It's how happy they are to go and be vulnerable to a colleague or a manager. It's how comfortable they are sharing ideas, and whether or not they're going to get credit stolen or whether it's going to work for them. And these things happen on a day-to-day basis. Do I go and ask that guy at the desk next to me? Can I go and talk to that lady in the adjacent department who's way senior to me but has information I need, do I feel comfortable doing it?

And then the emotional part of that and the comfort level of that evolves over time. You can't send down a memo and say, be nicer to people or be more open. It doesn't work that way. Some of it builds up over time. Management absolutely sets the tone for that. But it's not something that you can do overnight.

Culture is something that evolves over a long period of time. It can't be decreed that the thing that management has to do more than anything else is transparently live that culture. If you want people to do something, you've got to do it yourself. You've not got to just do it. You've got to be seen to do it on a day-to-day basis and you've got to see to do it authentically.

So yes, it belongs with management. No, it's not something you can decree and it's something that you've really got to change over time. You've got to move the ship slowly.

Sharma

I really like the fact that you said you got to live it. So, if you want your organization to focus on something, whether it's disruption or whether it's incrementalism, you need to live it. So you need to orient your thought process and then if people see you focusing on it, they'll focus naturally.

Foley

Absolutely. And back to that system one and system two on conscious thing, it's got to be authentic. If you're pretending to live a culture or live a style, every time you’re under pressure or something difficult happens, you're going to revert back to what you really are. So, it's got to be authentic. You've got to basically teach yourself to be what you want the company to be.

That's difficult, behavior is tough, but that's what you've got to do.

Sharma

This has been a fascinating conversation, Pete. Thank you so much for your time.

Foley

Oh, it's been a pleasure. Nice to chat with you.

Sharma

Thank you.

Announcer

The Decoding Innovation podcast series is a limited production of the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, based in Cleveland, Ohio. For more information, visit our website at ey.com/decodinginnovation. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe. Leave a review wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to spread the word.

The views of third parties set out in this podcast are not necessarily the views of the global EY organization or its member firms. Moreover, they should be seen in the context of the time they were made.