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Meagan
Hi. Welcome to Dig In the podcast brought to you by Dig Insights. Every week we interview founders, marketers and researchers, from innovative brands to learn how they're approaching their role and their category in a clever way.

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Paul
Welcome to dig in. My name is Paul Gaudette, CEO of Dig Insights, and I'm excited today to be joined by our guest, Melinda Leeman, who we've known for many years, an award winning innovation strategist, entrepreneur, one of the founders of a philanthropic cyclin organization, founder of Gig Inc and Honesty, an awesome person. We're so excited to have you here, Melinda.

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Paul
And we are going to be chatting about all things innovation. Welcome to our podcast.

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Melinda
Thank you, Paul. Glad to be here.

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Paul
I know you well. We've known each other for a long time, but obviously our listeners don't know you as well as I do, so maybe you can just tell us a bit about who you are, a bit about your background.

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Melinda
Sure. As you mentioned, I am founder of Gig at the strategic design firm Innovation Design Firm with a focus on commercializing ideas and making them happen. Let's go of background. I started as a marketer at companies like P&G, Kraft Warner-Lambert, now JNJ, and then I joined a boutique research agency. And at that time in the late nineties, I noticed that virtually every one of our clients had innovation on their agenda.

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Melinda
And so I launched an innovation division in our firm because nobody was really doing that work in Canada. And that's when I discovered my love of innovation. So fast forward a number of years. I became one of six partners in a global innovation firm. What happened? We sold that company about four years ago, and now I'm operating still in the innovation world as That's amazing.

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Paul
And and our background is actually I funny enough, I applied for a job a long, long, long time ago at an organization that was leveraging you as their innovation strategist. And they actually said, Can you interview me for the job? I didn't get the job. I don't know. Maybe it was just know. Maybe you didn't put forth my recommendation.

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Paul
I don't know. All things worked out because now I'm happy where I am. But I do remember that's the first time we met.

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Melinda
We knew there was a much greater destiny for you.

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Paul
Like, that's. That's part of my role.

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Melinda
That's what.

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Paul
Well, you know, congrats. First of all, congratulations on all your success, because I think we've been following you for a number of years from where you were to, you know, being one of the owners of Happen and selling that off and now being obviously the founder of Gig, Just your view on innovation, I think is completely, I think, new and refreshing to what many people might think of what innovation is.

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Paul
I'd love to kind of get your thoughts on like how do you describe innovation and why is it when you talk about it being like the thing you love to do, Why? Why is that? Why is innovation the thing you love?

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Melinda
Yeah, it is the thing I love for many reasons. I'll I'll give you a few. So first of all, I am fascinated with human behavior, motivations and dynamics and finding those powerful insights and not just the want and the need, but the why underneath the wants and the need and the important and complicated context around that. Secondly, I love that goose bumps moments when the stars align and insights reveal opportunity and breakthrough becomes inevitable.

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Melinda
And then I love that those breakthroughs change the lives of the people that are intended for, and not only those people, but the people who have the professional courage to pursue them.

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Paul
That's awesome. You know, when we maybe, you know, describe your to me your approach to how you think about innovation isn't is is somewhat unique. It's it's it's it's much more beyond just how do people use something differently in a new way. It's more really thinking again, kind of what you're saying about how does it really affect behavior, how consumers actually think about things in a completely new way, very disruptive in your approach and maybe you can talk a bit about your views of innovation, how maybe organizations are thinking about organized innovation.

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Paul
That's kind of where you think you would align or where you think they need help in.

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Melinda
Sure. Well, about eight years ago, I wrote this paper about a subject called Elegant Disruption, and I was struggling with the fact that all of our clients, virtually all of our clients coming to us in established businesses and they were looking to disrupt, disrupt their business in order to create impact. And more recently, they're using this word disruption in the same sentence as the word sprint.

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Melinda
And I thought, Oh, my gosh, that just isn't possible. And I thought, there's got to be a better way to think about this and and to approach it. And I thought, what what are they really trying to do? Because they've got a business that is successful, that has lost valuable structures and procedures, that has gotten them this far.

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Melinda
Why on earth would they want to create disruption, which is more likely to be disruptive to the organization than the industry that they're operating in? So I thought, what is it that they are really trying to do and how can we look at this differently? Because there is a fine line between disruption and disruption for sure. So what is elegant disruption and elegant disruption is about looking at the current situation and valuing what exists within that current structure or product or situation and taking the time to really understand what has to be kept and safeguarding that and then creating new worth and value and relevance in a way that's ongoing and sustaining in a new

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Melinda
contact. And why it's elegant is because it it takes time, it takes grace. It's more empathic and and it's not easy. It's not fast for sure. It's about the merging of contextualize insight plus design thinking. Which a strong desire to supersede the current way of doing things. But what it requires is taking a view of the current situation and overlaying a reimagined future.

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Melinda
What? Taking those two things and imagining those two things coming together in a new way that you haven't looked at it before?

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Paul
I want to I want to play back a couple of things because I think, you know, what you've said there is probably so relevant, but it can easily be missed that when you think about organizations who are trying to innovate, often they'll innovate with the idea of they want to be disruptive. And what you're saying here is it's a fine line between being disruptive and being destructive.

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Paul
And as a result of it, if you have a fairly somewhat successful industry or business that you're operating in right now, disruption could actually be more destructive to that existing business. So the idea is figure out which parts of that you want to keep and then think about how you can be disruptive in a more elegant approach, thoughtful approach, strategic approach without just thinking, yeah, this is now a sprint.

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Paul
I'm just going to change things completely and try something new. You want to be somewhat more thoughtful on how to safeguard the existing things while you're now thinking about how to what the future could look like and how to work towards that. Is that fair?

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Melinda
Correct. I was talking about this the other day with a client and friend at BMW Manufacturing Group and as introduced this term to his team. And they really it's really resonating. And in doing that, he also coined the term professional parades, which I thought was brilliant and different from regular courage, which is about facing your fear adversity that's very personal.

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Melinda
Professional courage is about doing what's right, what's ethical, what's strategic for an organization. And it's very disciplined. So he is very careful about protecting all of the very valuable processes that they have in place and taking the time to flex around the areas that need to change, given a new context.

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Paul
And what would be for them like that new context, we.

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Melinda
Are moving to. All battery operated. Yeah. Yeah.

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Paul
So as a whole, industry itself has been fairly disrupted by a shift to electric vehicles, brands like BMW and I'd say other you know, really, you know, established car manufacturers that have a heritage or a personality or love for what they're known for. And you need to kind of protect that before you think about how you're going to disrupt the other areas of the actual business.

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Paul
That's yeah. And I think I mean, is there whether example or what other industries do you think that or even maybe the ones that you've worked with where that you know that's kind of the one of the things that you know, really needs to be kind of understood before you kind of get into that exercise of, okay, we're going through an innovation, we want to innovate, we want to be disruptive.

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Paul
What are the things that we need to think about where you're seeing that maybe those industries kind of focused on that or need to consider that?

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Melinda
Right. Well, I'll give you a good example, one that I thought I thought it was handled beautifully and where elegant disruption came into play and look back to I think it was October 17th, 2018, when marijuana became legal in Canada. And in 2019 it was legal to open a brick and mortar retail store to sell it. And in order to do that, you needed a license.

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Melinda
And in order to get a license, you needed to sign the in order to get signed lease, you needed floor plan and a design. And in order to do that, you needed a target consumer value proposition, breakthrough insight and blueprint. And that was our team job for one particular client. And we had eight weeks to do this. And, you know, everybody was scrambling to get into this market and it was a race to the finish line.

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Melinda
So we talked to consumers, architects and we talked to Expert Catalyst. So this is one of the things we do in our work when you are trying to solve a problem, one of the best ways to do it is not two people in a parallel world and people who have already solved the problem that is similar but in their world.

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Melinda
And if you invite them in to help problem solve against your challenges, they see possibility because they've already solved it in their world. And you bring that in and it allows you to see possible solutions in a very new and and intriguing way so that we brought in a beat poet. You brought in a musician, you brought in an executive chef, and we brought in a movie set designer.

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Melinda
So in eight weeks we came up with the solution. And then two days before my client was going to apply for 37 licenses, the Ontario government changed the rules. They said, We're going to hold a lottery. And they only offered up 25 licenses and over 17,000 people applied. My client didn't get a single license, and nor did many of the big players in the market.

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Melinda
And so these 25 people who got a license literally won the lottery and they worked. Most of them weren't prepared to open a retail store at all. And what was interesting, they weren't allowed to sell them. So the strategic alliance and started happening and these deals were being made that, you know, were anywhere from 2 million to $10 million in in size.

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Melinda
And, you know, when if you were patient, you could get a license for $50,000. My client said, no, I'm not going there. This goes against my values, the values I'm trying to instill in the team. And what he did. And this is where he practiced elegant disruption is he said, how can we look at this situation, this new context, and see the goodness, how can we use this to our advantage?

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Melinda
And so he challenged the team to be unhappy with their current state of readiness. And he said leapfrog six months from now when we are going to open. And I want you to imagine how much stronger and better we're going to be with this extra time. So instead of them, you know, taking this bad news, he created a real motivation for them to get even better.

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Melinda
And then one of the foundational insights that we discovered in our target was that people wanted to feel normal. Now, in an industry that was criminalized, demonized and marginalized for way too long. And they wanted to do it in a way that was authentic so that they could live fully and not hide. And so we saw a lot of confusion, a lot of mixed messages and space, especially coming from the government.

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Melinda
So my client said, okay, I have time. I can hire a government relations firm and I can work with the different levels of government and I can start to influence policy and I can write op eds and I can establish a stronger leadership position for us by the time we get to market. And he also said to his team, okay, what is the positive in not getting a license?

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Melinda
While if you have a license, you're very limited to what you can say to the consumer and how you can talk to them. You don't have a license. You can say whatever you want. So they established a podcast called Putting It Bluntly, and they had very open conversations about the good, the bad, the ugly of the cannabis space, and answered a lot of questions that people were looking for answers to, like, am I a bad mom?

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Melinda
If I if I use cannabis after my kid goes to bed in my, you know, should I be embarrassed if this is how I manage my pain? And until they did all of that, and then they started to build a really strong community, and by the time it was time to license, they had had leapfrogged that much further ahead and made a real positive out of a tough situation.

00;15;39;16 - 00;15;59;00
Paul
I mean, the whole example is so relevant, I think, to everybody listening here, like the idea that to leverage parallel examples on people who very solved an issue and see how they've tackled it by you bring in you said you brought in a chef who else to bring in.

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Melinda
A movie set designer, a beat poet and well, we brought in a fashion designer as well, a musician. And, you know, so to give you an example of how they might have helped us. One of the things you can't do still is when you create a retail space, you can't get you aren't allowed to be able to see inside store.

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Paul
You mean for the cannabis stores you can't see inside the stores?

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Melinda
Correct. So how do you how do you create entry from the outside, someone walking by, especially in a space that was about to become incredibly competitive and saturated? How do you call attention to your store? And so the movie set designer had a lot to offer in in that room around intrigue and how to create interest and pull people.

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Paul
And how did you use that be poet.

00;16;56;27 - 00;17;42;02
Melinda
The beat poet was there was one of the elements of a the insight and the insight that we came up with was this idea of circle. Circle is very important in, in, in what we were creating from a design perspective. And she, she had a that was about the circle and, and how and she also worked with people who were with Narcotics Anonymous and this sort of accepting circle of and how you bring people into a circle and how you have a more authentic relationship.

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Melinda
So it's a, you know, kind of deep. But it was it was very cool because it allowed us to see certain design elements that were very important about bringing this circle imagery to life.

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Paul
Well, especially in in a category that, as you said, people want to feel normal around, They don't want that that type of stigma, especially if you if they have some sort of interest in it being able to be part of that community or part of that circle is is really it was really I mean, obviously clearly important that just I everything you say, I mean, this is kind of why I've loved following you for so long is because your approach to innovation, to me, just the idea of being able to really get people thinking and and being able to inspire thinking and be able to think differently, how helping people think differently.

00;18;28;18 - 00;18;54;29
Paul
I mean, that's true. And really true innovation happens. That's when they actually come up or think about things differently or get inspired to do things differently. And then it obviously translates into their passion for even accelerating the business and really what they're able to do. And so the cannabis example is a great one. I'd love to know like, is there, you know, do you have like a maybe a controversial or unpopular opinion of the state of building brands right now?

00;18;54;29 - 00;18;59;09
Paul
That might be. Yeah, not necessarily a popular opinion about it work.

00;18;59;10 - 00;19;31;07
Melinda
It's controversial, but I you know, I, I think people can be very impatient the term sprint and I think they put a lot of stake in a new technology. So a technology on its own is not necessarily a great idea without an insight, without a good strategy, without unique processes, and through a way to bring it to life.

00;19;31;09 - 00;19;37;21
Melinda
A technology is a catalyst for innovation, but how you bring it to life is what makes it magic.

00;19;37;23 - 00;19;56;22
Paul
That's fantastic. All right, Melinda, listen, I want to make sure that you're conscious of time here in your time. I do have some extra questions for you. We're going to do more rapid style version, though, of it, if that's okay with you. Does that work for you? Yeah. Yeah, that works for you. Okay, So can I see if your question is no, you know, no right or wrong answer?

00;19;56;22 - 00;20;02;14
Paul
Just kind of curious. First question. Favorite innovation in the market right now.

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Melinda
Okay. Can I give you two?

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Paul
Okay. Two favorite innovations.

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Melinda
One is personal immunotherapy. So immunotherapy has transformed the way people can fight and thrive beyond cancer. The idea of harnessing one's own body and immune system to fight a disease and to increase patient outcomes is remarkable to me. Well, I'm well, I'm more targeted approach that there's a great example of elegant disruption, the idea that you are sparing more healthy tissue and going going out the disease in a more targeted way with fewer in many cases, fewer adverse effects like nausea and fatigue, um, I think is really incredible.

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Melinda
And so.

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Paul
That was a first, first.

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Melinda
Second one, I don't know if you can see this. This fell on my arm. So this one I love, this is a continuous glucose monitor. This particular one is.

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Paul
I'm hearing more about these all the time, by the way. Good.

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Melinda
That's good. Yes. So I've been wearing this for about two years and this is not a new thing. These have been around for a while, but there's a new application of it that I hope is making its way to more and more people, because I think it's incredible. So what it does is it it measures your glucose levels and this one is super sapiens.

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Melinda
It continuous. So at any given time, you know the level of your glucose and that knowledge allows you to modulate it by what you're consuming. And why that's important is the various application. So you can use it to enhance athletic performance because you're giving yourself enough nutrition at the right time. It's largely how I use it, but it has a huge application for health and wellness and longevity.

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Melinda
So if you can flatten your glucose curve, you can modulate and and and, and live a healthier life, basically getting better sleep, eating better, better diet, better weight management and a whole host of things.

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Paul
I know I told me about this once before and and I have my wife now looking into this and I think we're both going to get one because. Yeah, I need to have that baseline. I need to the continuation measurement. I think it's awesome.

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Melinda
It's a.

00;22;54;13 - 00;22;55;12
Paul
Fantastic innovation.

00;22;55;12 - 00;22;55;27
Melinda
Yeah.

00;22;55;29 - 00;23;03;17
Paul
Fantastic innovation. Okay, next question. Best piece of career advice that you've been given are okay.

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Melinda
Do what you love in the money will follow Who do the work that doesn't feel like work. And and you know, that makes for a very good life.

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Paul
Okay. And and then lastly, what keeps you inspired to do what you do?

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Melinda
And I would say a steady diet of goose bumps. That's my life. Nice looking. Nice moments for sure.

00;23;29;28 - 00;23;51;07
Paul
That's amazing. Well, thank you so much, Melinda. You know, listeners, you've heard all about elegant disruption, which I think is just a fantastic term, how to leverage it, parallel examples of solving some of your most innovative challenges and and not think about innovation as a sprint. If you're interested in understanding how you can innovate, check out Get in touch with Melinda.

00;23;51;14 - 00;23;53;27
Paul
Melinda, it was such a pleasure having you on here. Thank you so much.

00;23;53;27 - 00;23;59;05
Melinda
Thank you. Paul, Great to see you.

00;23;59;08 - 00;24;06;06
Meagan
Thanks for tuning in this week. Find us on LinkedIn at Big Insights. And don't forget to hit. Subscribe for a weekly dose of fresh content.